“My friends, I apologize for pulling you away from the festivities,” the Duke said, shutting the heavy oak door behind him, “but I believe our lives to be in danger.” He turned to his guests and drew a deep breath. “It seems the Gaunt has decided to attend our soiree.”
The Beldam, fashionably attired in the skin of a flayed heretic, clapped her beautiful hand to her beautiful cheek. The Raconteur, already flushed and tousle-headed, wine staining his doublet, guffawed. The Corporal, a shard of obsidian in military dress, narrowed her flesh eye while its clockwork neighbor roved about the room.
“This is no jest,” the Duke said, unfolding a parchment leaf with trembling hands. “I found it only moments ago, inserted among the other notices of intention.”
At the sight of the Gaunt’s distinctive seal, the tarry black spiral that had portended countless grisly deaths, the Beldam and the Raconteur both shrieked aloud. The Corporal made no sound, but snatched the parchment from the Duke’s grip.
The Corporal’s clockwork eye split and rotated, bringing its full magnification to bear on the seal.
The other three waited, breaths bated.
“It appears genuine,” the Corporal squeaked.
The Duke had braced himself for this pronouncement, but still felt it like a hammer blow and heard a correspondent ringing in his ears. He searched for words to apologize to his guests, to offer them comfort.
“Then we are doomed.” The Beldam crumpled into the nearest chair, blinking. “Utterly, and entirely.”
The Raconteur pressed back against the wall, an animal cornered. “The Beldam’s correct,” he croaked. “The Gaunt likes nothing better than a soiree turned bloody. Remember the solstice garden party?”
The Beldam grimaced. “They found the Contessa strung from a lemon tree by her own intestines. Remember the carnival boat?”
“The carnival boat! They found the Bishop’s upper half nailed to the prow, and his lower in the bellies of several fishes.” The Raconteur chewed at his lips. “Murderous master of disguise that he is, the Gaunt might already stalk among us. He could be any one of the guests.”
“He, or she,” the Duke pointed out. “Or perhaps they. The Gaunt has never deigned to reveal such specificities.”
“He’s probably slithering through the party at this very instant,” the Raconteur mumbled. “Selecting his victims, slipping his infamous paralytic poison into their drinks…”
The Duke swallowed. “That does sound like him, her, or them,” he said, tugging at his beard. “Corporal, are you armed?”
“I’m always armed.” The Corporal’s clockwork eye was fixed now to the Raconteur. “So is this lad who knows so much about the Gaunt’s methods.”
The Raconteur startled, then straightened. “I make a living from sordid details,” he snapped. “And why shouldn’t I be armed? You’ve no idea how often I have to duel ex-lovers, and lovers of ex-lovers, and critics.”
The Duke raised a placating hand. “It’s quite his right to be armed. And it’s quite obvious that nobody here is the Gaunt.”
The Beldam’s laugh was soft and contemptuous. “Tell another one, Dukie.”
The Duke glared. “‘Dukie’?”
“The Gaunt can sew themselves into any skin they like,” the Beldam said. “They’re a changeling. That’s how they’ve gone uncaught for so long.”
“Rubbish.” The Corporal raised her chin. “The Gaunt is not some unearthly creature. Merely a killer who hides behind incredibly lifelike masks, and has the gift of flawlessly imitating any persona.”
“I imagine some personas would be easier than others, though,” the Raconteur muttered. “A persona with a big bushy beard and a fairly monotone voice, for instance.”
The Duke’s fingers, which had been stroking just such a beard, faltered. “‘Monotone’?” he demanded.
The Raconteur folded his arms. “Your address this evening was painful. I’ve told you time and again to work on your vocal emotive range. At the very least, it would dissuade the Gaunt from impersonating you.”
The Beldam tapped a thoughtful finger to her lips. “If the Gaunt were to impersonate someone, it would be rather sensible to impersonate the host. And then lead the guests to an isolated room, in small groups, to—”
She sliced the finger across her throat and imitated a death rattle. The Raconteur and Corporal followed her gaze to the Duke, whose jaw fell open.
“I brought you here to warn you!” he yelped. “How dare you accuse me of being the Gaunt! You’re the one wearing a human skin and knowing all about changelings.”
All eyes leapt to the flayed stole about the Beldam’s shoulders.
She gave a cutting laugh. “Please! As if the Gaunt could look this good.”
“She does look good,” the Corporal said. Her clockwork eye whirred. “Such facial symmetry seems almost… unnatural.”
She reached into her vest, perhaps for her flintlock, perhaps for her snuff. The Raconteur dove immediately to the floor, yanking the spring-gun from the lining of his doublet. The Beldam leapt from her chair with a direwood knife suddenly clutched in her bony fist.
“Friends!” the Duke croaked. “Come, now. None of us are the Gaunt, and none of us are murderers.” He cast about for a solution, some way to wet the hissing fuse. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle of spirits. “Perhaps we should all have a drink?”
The Raconteur’s eyes widened.
***
Three knocks went unanswered, so finally the servant opened the oak door and stepped inside, tray of canapes held aloft. They were greeted by tragedy:
The Duke, master of the house, gutted by a direwood knife. The Corporal, weathered veteran of a hundred wars, exsanguinated by a shard of glass bottle to the jugular. The beauteous Beldam and the rakish Raconteur, perforated by leadshot in a half-dozen places.
The servant scratched at the burlap of their crudely stitched costume, which was not remotely passable for house garb. They yanked off their flimsy masquerade mask to take a better look at the carnage.
They stared for a moment, then stuffed a canape in their mouth. “This again,” the Gaunt mumbled. “Goddamn it.”
Author’s Note: I wrote this story during the winter of 2021, shortly after watching Clue for the first time.
Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and currently writes from Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as the collection Tomorrow Factory. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Japanese, and adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Find free reads and support his work at patreon.com/richlarson.
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Changes Since the Last Window
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The Lineup
The Witches Who Drowned by R.J. Becks
On the Effects and Efficiency of Birdsong: A Meta-Analysis by F.T. Berner
The Unfactory by Derrick Boden
The Glorious Pursuit of Nominal by Lisa Brideau
Irina, Unafraid by Anna Clark
The Statue Hunt by E. Carey Crowder
The Matador and the Labyrinth by C.C. Finlay
Please Properly Cage Your Words by Beth Goder
The Rat King Who Wasn’t by Stephen Granade
In His Image by R. Haven
The Interview by Tim Hickson
Paths, Littlings, and Holy Things by Somto Ihezue
The Year the Sheep God Shattered by Marissa Lingen
Resurrection Scars by Sheila Massie
Application For Continuance: vMeet Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod) by Ethan Charles Reed
The sun’s almost down over the boardwalk, that time of day when everything’s dark but the sky’s still lit up, when townies drive past the lake on their way to Gary and say gosh it’s pretty out here by the battervilles, I don’t know what all the fuss is about.
The air’s thick with marina noise and mosquitoes eating up my shirtless chest. I’m pouring my jug of fresh-caught batter into the shuddering funnel of the change machine, even though I know in my heart there’s not enough to buy Ecker the smallest size of honey-glazed crispies. The line for the chicko joint is starting to wind down the boardwalk. Everyone’s yelling, a bunch of sunburned lake-slick battermags pissed I’m taking too long during the dinner rush. But I can’t let it go, not tonight. Ecker is leaving tomorrow to go back to vocational school, and he’s standing at the order window with his hands in his pockets like he’s embarrassed.
“How much left?” I shout. The metal of the machine groans, empty, impatient.
Ecker checks the little grease-smeared screen that’s converting my batter catch into chicko credits. “Thirty-two to go.”
“How much now?” I smack the bottom of my jug. A pathetic thunk of batter hits the funnel.
“Thirty-one.”
“Fuck outta here,” someone calls out from the back of the line. “That thing’s empty.”
“It’s not empty!”
“Did you scrape down the spout?” Ecker’s voice is a wince. He knows how weird the question is when four months ago he was right here with me, hoisting the jug and chanting big money big money while we watched the decimals turn over.
“Yeah, I fuckin’ scraped it down already.” I wipe my forehead against the crook of my elbow.
“Come on,” Ecker says. “Just let me get this with my stipend credits.”
Ecker with townie money, real money. There was a time he would’ve jumped over the counter, grabbed a chicko bucket and dashed. I remember one night specifically he ripped off his shirt before he did it, just to make everyone laugh, or because we were high. He was screaming like the seals in Penguin Slide and his torso was caked with black batter and ferrofluid and I don’t know if that’s the moment I knew I loved him but I think of it a lot, especially at night when there’s no one in the prefab but me and Skeeball, curled up with his little gecko fingers over my collarbone.
“I told you I got it. Just wait a minute, let me think.”
There’s a layer of batter stuck to my arm hairs. Some behind my ears, the oily black sludge of it gone tacky. It’s been a while since I scraped the cracked ridges of my sandals. The crowd hates that one. A wall of boos and groans as the dried-up sprinkling earns me one tenth of a cent.
“Next in line!” The guy at the chicko window’s had enough. He hovers his finger over the button that’ll recall the batter deposit and cancel my order.
“Look I’m so close, please, can you just round up.” I’m tapping the number on the conversion screen with both hands like a crazy person and there’s sweat dripping down my temple and everyone is yelling and I’ve seen the guy round up for everyone in this town including me but for some reason today he won’t because, I find myself screaming, he’s on a power trip in his stupid light-up hat.
He smacks the return button. The change machine vomits back exactly 5.73 credits worth of batter at my feet. The crowd cheers.
***
“It’ll just take a sec,” I tell Ecker. “I’ll take the boat out shallow, get some batter, and come right back.”
The boardwalk’s blinking with lights, boat crews pulling in and unloading their catch, divers stained with ferrofluid, some of them still scraping the batter off their magsuits. They call out to Ecker as we pass: hey big man, how’s school, how’s Illinois, you gonna come fix my septic tank, I got a hell of a block for ya. He responds with banter and a smile. He knows they’re only ribbing him because they’re proud. A battermag that tested good enough to pass the basic modules and go vocational, to a real brick-and-mortar school over the state line.
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t let me come out with you this morning.” Ecker almost trips over the tiny light-up bugs some kids are racing over the planks. “I could’ve helped.”
“What, with those soft little hands you got now?”
The joke drops awkward between us. It’s been like that all weekend. Our whole lives we’ve been giving each other shit, but Ecker came back from school with some kind of armor up. I keep catching him with a weird look on his face, like now, when he’s watching the little group of bug-racing kids. Marina brats, bare feet full of splinters, just like we used to be.
“Alright,” I tell him, voice softer than I mean. “You wanted to come out? We’re going out.”
I gather up Dough-girl from their usual spot, hanging out in front of the kluski joint with a bunch of other teens. The picnic tables are a wreck—red baskets with dumplings and butter pooled in the wax paper, kids crammed along the benches with their module helmets on, tapping their left ears to skim-skim-skim through the lessons. Five years ago it would’ve been me and Ecker here tracing bored lines in the ketchup, blue light flashing over the balled-up napkins. Dough-girl’s in the middle, chewing on a fry through the bottom of their visor.
“Hey.” I knock on Dough-girl’s helmet. “You know you’re supposed to listen to those.”
Dough-girl looks up. I can see Ecker and me reflected in the helmet’s visor, a funhouse mirror of boardwalk neon and the pizza shack behind us.
“You sound like my dad.” Dough-girl’s voice is garbled by the math lesson squeaking from the tinny speakers. “What’s the point?”
“I dunno, learn shit or something.”
“So what, like I’m gonna test out?”
“Christ, Dough-girl, you ever tried to get on a bus? Go on, go to the depot and ask to pay for a ticket with your batterville credits. Might as well be a carmdot punch card.”
Dough-girl rants back but it’s muffled by some kind of science unit about capillaries. I can feel Ecker shift his feet beside me, the discomfort wafting off him.
“Whatever,” I say. “Do what you want. We’re going out again. Fuckin’ chicko guy wouldn’t round up.”
Dough-girl pulls off their helmet. “But it’s dark and we’re out of b-powder. It wasn’t even glowing last time under the blacklight. It’s too cut down.”
“Fine, we’ll get some more. Where’s Brill?”
“Probably sleeping in the boat, right?” Ecker says. He meets my eyes for the first time all night, and it’s then that I realize his hair is curling around his ears even though he doesn’t like it to get so long, that in the four months he was gone he never got it trimmed, that the haircut I’m seeing is the one I gave him in his boxers on the concrete of my front steps.
***
All the unloading stragglers shake their heads when they see us approach their boats, pleading, hopeful, primed to beg. The only one who doesn’t shout us away is Izzie, the last of the olds from back in the day when the cleanup boom first happened, when this town was nothing but deep woods and dead fish rotting on the shore, their bellies swollen with plastic.
Izzie just stands there on the boat deck with the bag of yellow powder, sucking her teeth. A softie. When me and Ecker were little she used to let us crush up the vitamin pills for her. We’d get to swipe a fingerful of batter from her catch tub as a reward.
“I’ll pay you back,” I say.
“You owe us like a pound of b already.”
“Hey!” Dough-girl points over at Izzie’s partner by the net. He’s sifting out white plastic pellets from the lake weeds and trash. “They caught pearl.”
Only a fistful, but it’s enough for two months’ rent. I’ve always been told that the battervilles started as a settlement; a bunch of tents and prefabs full of people who got demerited out of the big warehouse jobs. Back then Lake Michigan was dying, but not yet dead. The government paid good money to clean up microplastics from the lake, turn it into batter you could collect and slop into a cooler. I saw one of those old commercials once: a tattooed guy and an old lady smiling in this cute painted rowboat, dumping in their dainty bottles of ferrofluid and swishing the water with those tiny magnetic wands that could only catch the world’s saddest clump of batter. It didn’t take long for people to start getting smart, strapping head to toe in duct tape and all the magnets they could find, but it was pearl that made the town boom. Some kind of lawsuit found out that a specific company had spent decades dumping little plastic pellets into lakebound drains, and made them pay big money for every little pearl you could catch. I don’t remember much from my modules, just a picture of a fish, figure A or B or something, spliced open. The white pellets were packed in along the twisty pink of the intestines like the fish had been born with them there, a weird little row of gut teeth.
“You think that’s a trove?” Izzie waves off the handful of pearl like it pains her. “You should’ve seen us thirty years ago. We used to come back with buckets full of the stuff. That’s why they brought in the change machines. We were pulling it out of the water so fast they had to automate.”
“Yeah and you guys sucked it all up,” Dough-girl says. “Now all that’s left is batter you can’t buy shit with.”
“What, you want us to leave it there to end up in the fish bellies? You don’t want the lake to come back?”
“Lake’s never gonna come back,” I say. “It’s a fuckin’ batter bowl. All we can do now is make the money we can. See, you owe us the b-powder at least, come on.”
“Fine, but I swear t—”
“Where’d you find the pearl?” Ecker’s voice cuts through.
His hands are in his pockets again but he sounds like the kid I used to know, the one that won our shitty motorboat in a diving bet and stood with his arms crossed in the doorway of my prefab when my mom finally showed up to claim it five years after she disappeared.
No one bothers fishing for pearl anymore. You might find one or two free floaters, but the only clumps left are in pockets on the lakebed, trapped in the weeds and algae muck. It’s more of a legend at this point, and I don’t know why Ecker cares. He’s only here for the weekend until he goes back to his plumbing program with the nice little dorms he sent me a picture of: tables where you can eat outside in a subdivision with green astroturf instead of dead baked grass.
“We were up by Michigan City then we cut west. Don’t waste your time, kids. It was a fluke.”
“Michigan City. Got it.” Ecker turns to me. “You ready?”
I don’t like the look in his eye.
Growing up, me and Ecker always dreamed of hitting it big. Even pearl credits don’t mean shit outside the battervilles, but we didn’t care. We’d be kings of the boardwalk, buy a big prefab tricked out with a tactile lounge for Penguin Slide and a backyard full of ATVs. Even if we never got the big house, I always thought we’d end up living together. Fantasized about making him dinner, with like 30% meat burgers or something nice, and he’d look over at me and smile like when we were little, floating on our backs in the lake and laughing because we were so close to sinking. I’m not stupid. I’ve always known the rest of the fantasy would never happen. Ecker likes smart guys, the ones that make him talk nervous, biting into all his consonants. Not me, the dumb easy one that smears him with a lazy smile like cornoil butter on bread.
Ecker didn’t tell me he got into vocational school until two days before he was supposed to leave. All the crews got together to throw him a party and he avoided me the whole time, already packing his fists into his pockets like a stranger. But at two a.m. when everyone was drunk and setting off fireworks in the backyard he pushed me into the murphy laundry of Izzie’s prefab and held my face in his hands and kissed me like we’d never been two separate pieces, only one whole.
***
We’re speeding out on the black, just the four of us. All the boats have already come in. Ecker shouts over the wind and motor to tease me about my steering, the way I still whip the rudder with a little flourish of my hand like I’m on some kind of stage. It feels like it used to, before we even took on Dough-girl and Brill, when we were just a crew of two, laying down in the boat between dives and talking about the dumbest stuff.
Just past Michigan City we drop anchor in one spot, then another. Me and Ecker dive together. The bottom of the lake is barren, a tangle of weeds and sunken boats and not a single pearl. When I was little it sucked the air out of my lungs to be down on the lakebed, the feeling that you’re not touching the weeds and grimed up junk so much as it’s got you in its own fingers. People say it’s the kind of darkness that crushes you, but it doesn’t bother me. Not anymore.
At our fifth or sixth spot we give Brill and Dough-girl a turn to dive. Me and Ecker sit in the midnight quiet, sniffling lakewater snot and listening to the chop against the boat.
“We’re not gonna find shit out here, Eck.”
“Maybe not the way you shake the weeds.”
“Oh and your little barrel roll is gonna do the trick.” I tease him back, imitating the twist that he does with his eyes closed, graceful as a dancer, though I’d never admit that I don’t think it’s funny at all but beautiful.
“Even if we found pearl it’d be wasted on you anyway,” he laughs. “I know you’d just blow it on your damn lizard.”
“Skeeball’s a fuckin’ gecko, first of all, and the specialty waxworms help with his digestion issues.”
“Right, right, the digestion issues.”
Ecker looks at me the way he used to. Like the time I got the idea in my head that we were gonna save up all of our kluski wrappers to wallpaper my bedroom with the little thumbs-up noodle mascot. Like it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard and he loves me for it and every goddamn time it makes my head go fuzzy.
Ecker rubs the water from his face with both hands, and when he’s done he stares at the bottom of the boat, the smile gone from his eyes.
“On the bus ride in I saw one of those big prefabs for sale, you know the ones we used to talk about, with the heated floors and the tactile hookup.”
“Yeah?”
“I was just thinking, like, if we could just find a little pearl, then maybe I don’t have to go back to school.”
“What, you don’t like it there?”
“No, I mean, it’s fine. It’s a bunch of townie kids that flunked their modules, couldn’t get into college even though their parents paid for all the tutoring add-ons. I’m the only battermag there. Sometimes I just want to be back home. With the people that know me. You know?”
Ecker stretches his feet out the way he’s done a hundred times in this boat, but this time he nestles his foot between mine, the way I imagine people do when they’re curled up in bed together, twined into the close spaces, breathing each other’s air. It makes me shiver to imagine that small amount of body heat spread out heavy on top of me and at the same time I can’t stop thinking of Ecker at the bottom of the lake, twirling with his fists crossed over his chest. Smiling, under the weight of all that black water.
Dough-girl and Brill surface with a splash, cussing into the night.
“There’s no pearl down here,” they say. “This is stupid. Let’s get some batter and go home.”
Ecker sits up, his foot no longer touching mine. I feel the ghost of it on my skin, like a handful of empty water.
***
The magsuit’s heavy and sticks to the edge of the boat, cause we only had enough money to anti-mag the bottom and sides. Some parts of the fabric are still damp from this morning, itchy cold against my skin. I tap the velcro pockets along my arms, belly, shins, smushing in the fraying duct-taped corners to make sure the magnets hold. Dough-girl ties me to the floater tube that’ll keep me just a few yards below surface, so the weight of the suit doesn’t pull me to the lakebed. I tell them to give me more slack. I like to move around.
When we’re ready to go, Ecker pours Izzie’s little ziploc bag of b-powder into the old milk jug stained grayish with ferrofluid, then Brill clicks on the industrial blacklight. It lights up her gapped teeth, makes the ferro glow like the prairie moon.
“Fifteen count, alright?” Eck hands me the glowing jug. “On yours.”
“Got it,” I say. “One.”
He shoves me into the water.
Two, three. I squeeze out the ferrofluid, give its oil molecules a chance to find their tiny plastic cousins swirling around the water.
Seven, eight. The magic starts. A slash of hi-vis yellow in the dark.
Microplastic binds to oil, then magnetite, then boom. Lightning in a bottle. It all shrinks together into little glowing clumps of muck like something that’s alive. I hold out my magnetic arm, watch the batter fireflies gather along my elbow and stomach and all the way down to my toes.
Thirteen. There’s a tickle of weeds. My foot hits mushy bottom. Shit. I reach for the rope to the flotation tube and where it should be there’s only water. Shit, shit.
Nineteen. Forty. I lose count.
The suit’s so heavy it presses me to the lakebed. When I thrash I just churn up the mud, deeper and deeper. I clench my jaw to keep from sucking water but I can’t hold it anymore, I can’t, cause it feels like we’re somewhere between a hundred and thousand.
A tug.
A yank in my guts.
Air.
Ecker, treading next to me in the water. His face under the blacklight, all twisted up and heaving, then suddenly he’s looking behind me, and I see it behind him, too.
Hundreds of them, glowing UV-bright. Riding on the surface of the waves like it’s not made of water but pearl.
***
We scoop up the pellets, pack them in the mesh net at the back of the boat. There are so many fistfuls we lose count. Brill cracks open a beer and passes it around to celebrate, and I have to stop Dough-girl from chucking their module helmet into the lake saying now none of it matters.
Ecker skins off my magsuit, wraps me in a towel while he scrapes the last bit of batter from the inside of my elbow. He tells me he’s not going to take his bus tomorrow. He looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. I try not to cry.
We crank the boat up to high speed and soon enough I can see the batterville lights again, the little stretch of boardwalk where Eck and I grew up and will die together if I let him. Feels like I should be flying, but I’m just shivering.
In the net behind me is our future together in the big prefab, all the weed and Penguin Slide we could ever want. Ecker pressed up behind me in the morning, kissing my neck. Six ATVs in the backyard and fireworks and the both of us shirtless, smiles receding as the ash cools on the cement. In ten years we’ll be like the handful of others who struck it big with pearl, the ones buying out rounds at the boardwalk bar, wrinkled and wasted, telling stories everyone’s already heard. He’ll grow tired of my easy jokes, my yellowing teeth. He’ll wish he never came home.
Ecker smiles at me over his shoulder, and in the dark I hope the one I give back to him looks real.
I wait until he’s turned around again, until I can only see the windblown rooster of his hair. The net latch’s not hard to open. I do it with one hand.
I’ll take it, this little moment. When the pearls are leaking out onto the waves around us and no one can see them, not even me.
Author’s Note: This story has a few real-life roots. The first is a documentary I watched about a company that’s been dumping millions of plastic byproduct pellets into Lavaca Bay in Texas. The imagery was so alien—this egg-like debris washed up in the weeds along the water’s edge, with people gathering them in nets and grimy handfuls like the day’s catch. I started thinking about monetized recycling efforts, and the story grew from there. While researching, I came across a very cool method of ferrofluid-based microplastic extraction proposed by a young Irish inventor named Fionn Ferreira. In the video I watched, it was just a little beaker and a clump of black goo, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what that would look like on a larger scale. Oh and lastly: B vitamins really do glow under black light. What a world.
Steph Kwiatkowski is a writer and preschool teacher from suburban Illinois. She is a graduate of Clarion West 2022 and her stories have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Nightmare, and Uncanny.
I’ve attached scans of the student letters per my conversation with Anthony Noble at the White House Teacher’s Dinner. To be honest, we’re all enormously starstruck by the Secretary’s offer. We’ve guarded our Pilgrim Letters jealously through the years—our own little time capsule—but it’s not every day your elementary school gets to participate in cultural diplomacy.
Note that the earliest letters date back to 1967, a mere five years after Beacon Day. While they were assigned only as creative writing exercises—the technology to reply to the first Beacon transmissions didn’t even exist when Ms. Barbara Kirby came up with the idea—I’m sure the children who wrote these letters all those years ago would be ecstatic to learn that their words would one day reach the stars.
With sincere gratitude,
Brianna Wen
Principal, Mt. Monroe Elementary
***
“If you could write a letter to the Pilgrims on their ship, what would it say?” Barbara Kirby’s third grade class, 1967.
Dear Pilgrims, my name is Patricia but people call me Patty. Miss K says you’re going to be flying in outer space for a very long time! You will fly for your whole life and my whole life and my baby brother’s whole life and Toothpick’s whole life (he is my puppy). But maybe my daughter will meet you if she gets VERY old. Please make friends with her when you get to Earth. She will live in Michigan like I do and she’ll cook you onion soup.
— Patty Ward
Hello aliens, I am scared of you so please turn around. I know you made a mistake because when you left home we didn’t have radios yet so you listened and listened and you thought Earth was a big empty, but now you know we lived here first. So you should go home. Maybe you can figure out how to turn around if you really really try.
— Linda Jimenez
Dear aliens, my dad says Johnson’s going to bungle everything ! ! Yesterday people sat in the Capitol and said they would not move until the government invented blasters to fight you. Please write back soon because Miss K says right now it takes 12 years to get your messages and everybody’s really confused over here. (P.S. have you heard the Beatles on the radio yet?)
— Kenneth MacInnes
***
Donald Levias’s third grade class, 1974.
Dear The Pilgrims my uncle says you’re fake because it doesn’t make sense how you picked our planet out of all the other planets because how come aliens just happen to breathe oxygen same as us and why do you have radios and math and stuff same as us. And so he thinks the government made you up like the moon landing. But Mr. Levias says you picked Earth because you breathe the same air as humans or else you wouldn’t have picked Earth so we would’ve never met you. But my uncle says that’s a circle argument. And then my mom said you’re real but actually you just want to grind us up and feed us to your chickens. The end.
— Armin Cox
Hello, my neighbor went to Michigan State to learn about lasers so she could help talk back to you guys. She says it’s a big funky puzzle we are all solving together and that it means we’re learning to talk to outer space really fast. Do you like puzzles? I like playing games on road trips. I drew hangman so you can play it on your road trip to Earth.
— Steve Rascon
Dear Pilgrims, you shouldn’t come here! There isn’t enough room! People are still angry at you and the computer that gives you orders! It’s hard to be angry because you won’t be here for more than one hundred years! But people will try to stay angry!!!!
— Angie Zielinski
Dear Pilgrims, the four Beacons you have sent so far didn’t say anything about your biology. I read that some scientists think you have a hard crab shell but others think that your brain would never be able to get big enough to invent interstellar space flight that way. You need to provide more information.
— Jessamine St. John Hall
Hi aliens, I live at 25881 Warren Lane and I have a lazy old dog named Toothpick. I like to swim and play the recorder. I have a big sister named Patricia but people call her Patty. She doesn’t want to talk to you anymore because you didn’t answer her letter. She used to really like aliens but now she thinks it’s stupid to write letters to somebody we will never get to meet. Even though she has a pen pal in California.
— Donovan Ward
***
Patty Ward’s third grade class, 1986.
Dear Pilgrims, Miss Patty says we don’t have to write letters because it’s a sad tradition. You are far away and you are not getting to Earth until our class is dead already. But my mom says the 3rd graders used to write letters, so I will still do it and Miss Patty will put it in the folder.
They tried to put a teacher in space last week to teach kids how we’re sending our own Beacons back to you. But the ship exploded and we watched on TV and I cried and Miss Patty cried and everybody cried. It feels like we are stuck on Earth. But I want to tell you it used to take a whole year to walk to China. And people still wrote letters and traded rubies and tea and silky clothes. So it’s okay that our first answer message won’t hit you guys for ten years. We will be patient. And we will think up new things to tell you in the meantime. And the road will get shorter and shorter. And then you will be here.
— Poppy Jimenez
***
Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2000.
Dear Amnid Thorn, my favorite are social studies lessons about you and your supercomputer. What is it like to be in charge of all the Pilgrims??! What is it like doing what the computer says all the time? What is it like to be born in space and die in space and never see the Earth and still have to make sure everybody does their jobs anyway? I would freak!!!! (P.S.! My mom said to tell you Deut. 34:4-5)
— Teresa Nowak
Dear Pilgrims, a scientist came to talk to us about how all the plants on your ship keep you alive her name is Jessamine St. John Hall and she used to go here so Ms. Patty even let us write letters to you guys because the scientist said it was her best school memory she made everybody so excited and she told everybody’s parents to call their senators about making room for you guys since ninety years is not a long time.
— Ryan Moreau
Hello Pilgrims, I want to say SORRY. Ms. Patty read us a poem about the FOIBLES of MAN. She says our brains don’t work right when a problem is too big or too far away. So even though everybody WANTS to make plans for when you get here, because you will need houses or maybe you will need to go to prison, nobody KNOWS HOW to make a plan stick so far ahead. It’s like GLOBAL WARMING. Ms. Patty looked SAD.
— Dylan Pham
***
Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2013.
Dear Pilgrims, do aliens fall in love? I know you can’t marry whoever you want because the computer has to say yes, BUT I found a book in my mom’s car where a lady in Texas was trying to stop her evil husband from taking over her ranch but then a Pilgrim met her in disguise when she was out riding her horse and when they started kissing all the rain turned into space diamonds that let them read each other’s minds. Do you think that will happen a lot when you get here?
— Pacifica Carmine
Dear Amnid Thorn, I’m sorry you’re not the leader anymore. I would have said sorry sooner except it took us eight years to get the news. I am glad the Pilgrims are still coming here. The new Beacon did not say what you’re doing now after everybody did a mutiny to you but I hope you’re not in jail and you are building a deck to chillax on like my grandpa did after he retired. I love you.
— Shaina Feldman
Dear Pilgrim peeps, can you tell me who is right my mom or my dad? My mom says you are not real and the government made you up to make us pay more taxes. My dad says nobody can keep a secret that big for 50 years SO you are real BUT your new president will start a war with Earth or maybe crash the whole ship, AND you did 9/11. Who is right?
— Arjun Bakshi
Dear Pilgrims, I remember what it felt like to write you a letterto pretend to write to talk to you like an imaginary friend. That was a long Sometimes I worry. If you were to face disaster, we wouldn’t know for many years. Perhaps a regime change was inevitable on a voyage of your length, but I hear about what’s happening there (what happened there is what I mean), and I watch our ineptitude unfold here, and I worry that you’ll never
— unattributed
***
Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2024.
Dear Pilgrims, a famous biologist (Dr. St. John Hall) Zoomed with our class about how humans are sending instructions to help the plants in your ship make better air. This is the first time we ever gave you advice. Do you think we’re bossy? I have another good advice: don’t go out in space because your eyes will explode.
— Nyla Ehlmann
Hi Pilgrims, do you guys feel okay without the computer making you follow the rules anymore? Do you get enough food? We zoomed with a scientist who says you guys had bad times after the Mutiny, and it could have got worse and worse and worse. But what’s important is everybody works together and does lots of brainstorming. So the ship can get changed around. So there’s lots of food and air so you can make your own choices even if they are mistakes sometimes. I will study biology when I grow up, too. Or maybe firefighting.
— Jayden Goddard
Hello Pilgrims, my name is Olivia but everybody calls me Liv. I love video games and my favorite books are about a Pilgrim teenager who solves mysteries on your ship. I am really really excited to meet you!!! I will be 76 years old when you get here. I will show you all over Michigan but especially Mackinac Island where you can ride the horses. Please please please visit me. Welcome to your new home! ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
— Liv Liu
Dear Pilgrims, my dad does not like you. He thinks you are going to trick us and trap us, but he says it’s so far away nobody can do anything about it. Maybe if you tell me a little bit about yourself I can explain to him? I can explain you just wanted to travel somewhere new like when we moved from South Bend. If you visit me in 2090 I will go fishing with you. Because that is how my dad makes friends.
— Matt Wojcik
Dear Pilgrims,
I’m ashamed of our social rhythms: we back-bite and haggle and fail to think in the long term.
I thought you might be the same, but instead you incorporated your revolution and hobbled on. Your last Beacon said your sociologists even planned for it. I find myself disturbed and comforted in equal measure.
Can we learn to think that way? Should we?
I knew I wouldn’t get to meet you; some friends stay imaginary. But I thought maybe I’d make it closer than this. I start treatment in the spring, which is as good a reason to retire as any.
I didn’t have a daughter who could make you onion soup. Instead, I’ve taught a thousand bold and brilliant children, some of whom would very much like to meet you. Their long-term thinking is both better and worse than mine. An hour’s wait bothers them, while a hundred years does not.
They’ve written you some beautiful letters. I’m trying to learn from them: the road will get shorter and shorter, and then you’ll be here.
Author’s Note: Plenty of fiction has been set aboard generation ships; I wondered what that timescale would feel like from the outside. Would the experience rhyme in some ways? Would we even be capable of effective planning that far ahead? As for the voices I chose to tell this story with: Kids handle certain things better than adults do. That’s just facts.
Sarah Pauling spent several years sending other people to distant places for a living as a study abroad advisor in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She’s now in Seattle, graciously sharing her home with two cats and a husband. A graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, her stories have appeared in places like Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and Clarkesworld. She can occasionally be found at @_paulings on Twitter, nattering on about writing, tabletop gaming, comics, and books.
The shop fronts glitter along Dreamwright Street, where all the best people come to buy their dreams. Sunlight winks off polished glass, clear as crystal; off the lovingly applied varnish of the wooden window frames; off fragments of mica embedded in the very cobblestones.
The customers, too, sparkle. Light leaps from the gemstones they wear, from their polished shoes, from the braid on their servants’ livery. Clear eyes reflect the dancing light, and their bright teeth send back radiance as they smile. The customers of Dreamwright Street sleep well in their high mansions, and they sleep deeply, and when they arise, their minds are clear and scintillating as a wellspring.
A gleaming brass bell sounds a note that shimmers in the air like the light through the clean windows, and old Habsor looks up from his ledger behind the counter of polished wood. Seeing the customer, he hurries forward, bowing, his dreamwright’s conical cap flopping over at the point, as if it bows too.
“My Lord,” says Habsor. “A pleasure.”
“Good morning, Habsor!” says the customer in the hearty, bluff voice of a man who sleeps well and dreams of being a god, and wakes and finds himself a lord of the greatest city in the world.
“And… can this be… your youngest, already so tall?” says Habsor, stooping as best his aged limbs permit to look the customer’s companion in the eye. The little girl, well-trained in etiquette, does not curtsey to the tradesman, but inclines her head.
“My precious Ani,” says her father. “Come to get her first proper dream, to share with her friends on her birthnight.”
“My Lord, you flatter me by choosing my humble establishment.” He gestures to the spotless, well-appointed room with its frescoes of dreamscapes, painted by prominent artists.
“Only the best, Habsor. Only the best.”
“Your Lordship is too kind. Shall we?”
In the window, Habsor hangs the discreet sign informing other customers that he is not currently receiving, and bows the father and daughter into a back room, even more beautiful than the main shop, though smaller. He does not fool himself that it is remotely comparable to the rooms the girl has grown up in; he is a wealthy tradesman, but no more than that.
When they are seated, and Habsor has served his customers sparkling waters and bright cakes, he asks them, “What dream can I craft for you today?”
“I want to fly,” says the child. Her father watches her, indulgence written on his face. “I want to fly in a chariot drawn by ten eagles, and cast down thunderbolts on those turning up their faces from below.”
“That is a very particular request,” says the dreamwright. “May I ask if there is a special reason?”
“For my friend Suan’s birthnight,” says Ani, “we had a flying dream, and I think it is the best kind of dream a person can have. And we have a fresco at home with the eagles and the thunderbolts.”
“I believe I remember it,” says Habsor. He has occasionally come and consulted at the lord’s home, in light of the business the family gives him. “I can certainly accommodate that request.”
“I was sure you would,” her father says.
“I will have it sent round this evening,” says Habsor, and after a few abbreviated pleasantries, such as are appropriate between customer and tradesman, bows the pair out again. They have not discussed price, nor will they. His Lordship’s man of business knows the going rate, and will pay Habsor’s bill without troubling His Lordship with such details.
Habsor locks his shop, pushes through the curtain behind the counter, unlocks his workshop, and sets to. The dream fluid must be compounded fresh if it is to produce the finest dreams; none of your warehoused dreamstuff for His Lordship and his family. Habsor prepares the base medium under a prism which brings in sunlight from the street outside, then unlocks the several heavy bolts on the rear door of his shop and steps through it.
The alley behind Dreamwright Street is grimy, worn, and cluttered—cluttered, especially, with those who come to sell their dreams. Ragged, shivering in the shadows of the alley, they look up with what little hope they have left at the opening of the door, like a sick old dog who nevertheless will lift his head when the master is eating.
“Flyers,” says Habsor. “Flyers only.”
Many of the heads go down again, but a few stagger to their feet and shuffle forwards. One lad is more active than the rest, standing quickly, stepping up lively, pushing his way to the front. His eyes are not yet dulled, though his face is dirty, and his clothes are the grubby leavings of a bigger and older man.
“You,” says Habsor. “You’ll do.” As a dreamwright, he goes through life always a little weary, and this untapped youth’s vigor will spare him some mental effort in the compounding of the fluid.
He pulls the boy by his shoulder into the workroom. The others subside, not even registering disappointment anymore. They will sell, or they won’t; they will eat, or they won’t. Soon, they will lose all hope, but also their motivation to leave the alley; there will be no more coins to take to sick or hungry family, or to spend on drink or food for themselves. Periodically, the dreamwrights, at their joint expense, have the alley cleared of those too miserable to produce any longer. Having them die and rot in the alley would be unpleasant, and might taint the others’ dreams.
In his workroom, Habsor, fastidious, places a drop-cloth over one chair and seats the boy in it, then takes the other. He sets aside his cap and lowers the apparatus over their heads. The boy reaches up to adjust it, and Habsor scolds him, then moves it himself. The apparatus is delicate, expensive. It gleams with silvery metal and polished glass, and the crystal bearings on its many spider-joints spark even in the dim light of the workroom. The coppery crowns which cap the heads of the operator and his source are studded with small topazes, painstakingly matched.
“You’ve not done this before?” says Habsor.
“No.”
Habsor had thought he might have been drawn upon before, perhaps by another dreamwright; the youth’s eyes, although clear and undimmed, had not widened in wonder on entering the workroom, as first-timers’ eyes usually did. But perhaps he was merely incurious.
“Sit still, then, and when I tell you, think of a chariot, flying, with eagles drawing it. Flying above a crowd.”
Habsor places the flask of fluid at the appropriate station, adjusts the valves, and says, “Begin.” He falls at once into the trance of his trade.
The work goes smoothly, easily. The boy’s ready flow suggests some fragment of a dreamwright’s talent, which, had he been born into the correct level of society, might make him worth apprenticing. The emotional side of the dream will take care of itself, so he ignores that and focuses on perfecting the decorative detail. He builds the platform, the golden chariot, imitating as well as he can remember the one in the lord’s fresco—though it needs only to be close enough that the girl and her guests will fill in the rest. The eagles, next, and then the thunderbolts. Last of all, the crowd of peasants beneath, their gaping faces turned up in terrified worship of the lord’s daughter as she passes overhead. They bear a certain inevitable resemblance to the dull-eyed crowd in the back alley.
The dream fluid condenses—a fine, clear sapphire blue—in the upper sphere of the apparatus, and slides through labyrinths of tubing before dripping into the flask. It’s a smooth, easy draw, with good pressure, and no impurities to filter. Seeing its clarity, he makes no more than a perfunctory check, swirling it under his nose and sniffing. No need to taste such limpid dreamstuff and reduce the volume provided to the client.
Finished, Habsor closes the glass valves, caps off the flask and escorts the lad to the back door, where he drops a silver coin into a grubby, eager hand.
***
It is the next day, and Habsor is writing up his invoice when the door of his shop bursts open, the bell jangling in a frenzy, as if attacked by a frustrated parrot. Men in the lord’s livery march in, grim-faced, and two of them haul him, protesting and pleading for explanations, from behind his counter and out into the street. He is not given the opportunity to lock up his shop, or even to place the discreet sign in the window.
Outside, he sees a man run past, an expensive coat at odds with the rags beneath it. Behind him puff city guards. Customers and dreamwrights alike watch the running man, their eyes troubled, but they carefully do not look at Habsor.
He is conveyed by carriage and by silent guards to a cell, where, after a panicked wait during which nobody will talk to him, he is joined by the lord, backed by a city magistrate. The lord’s face is the face of the mountains when thunder is in the air.
“My lord,” grovels the desperate Habsor, “please tell me what I have done. Was the dream not satisfactory?”
“Not satisfactory?” the lord barks out. “I should say it was not satisfactory! Ani has had to be retrieved three times already today from servants’ quarters and slums, where she was distributing my clothes and possessions, and asking everyone about a ragged boy. She dreamed she was that boy, she says, staring up at the terrifying sight of a chariot in the sky. She is weeping now, weeping for the lives of the poor, weeping for their fears and the loss of their dreams. And across the city, the other daughters of the nobility are doing much the same.”
“But… how?” asks Habsor.
“You, a master dreamwright, ask me this? What did you do?“
“I did only what I have done a thousand times. I changed no step in the preparation of the dream. Only… the boy I used was new.”
“Boy?”
“It is necessary, My Lord, to harvest the raw stuff of dreams from some person or another. I chose a new boy, one of those who wait in the alley behind Dreamwright Street to sell me their dreams…”
“Take him,” the lord orders the guards. “Bring back this boy, along with the dreamwright. We will get to the bottom of this. And when we do, Habsor, you will be fortunate indeed if you are still permitted to serve the city brewing nightmares for the interrogators’ stock.”
Habsor shudders. The brewing of nightmares drinks a man’s soul by daily sips, until he runs mad at last. Better to join the hopeless in the alley than to serve in such a way. Better to leave behind his wealth and his fame, and flee the only city in the world where dreams are brewed. He begins to evolve panicked plans.
They enter through the front of the shop, and Habsor, hands trembling, fumbles with his key in the lock of the workroom. It will not turn. Frustrated, he tries the handle, and the door swings open. The care he has taken to oil the hinges deprives it of the ominous creak which would suit his state of mind.
Within, he fears to find the delicate apparatus shattered or plundered, but all is intact and accounted for. Still, there are signs that someone has been in the room; items are not in the exact places where Habsor always lays them. When he checks the apparatus, he can tell it has been used.
Worse, the bolts on the back door have been thrown back. He hurries to the portal, cracks it open, then flings it wide.
The alley behind Dreamwright Street is empty of the unfortunates who sell their wonder and their hope. A few possessions, so mean and tawdry that even those with so little do not value them enough to carry them away, lie scattered on the dirty and uneven stones.
He turns to the officer in charge of the guards, eyes wide. “I do not understand,” he says. “My shop has been entered, but nothing has been taken. And all the dreamers are gone.”
The officer snaps to a guard, “Go, question the neighboring tradesmen. Perhaps they saw something.”
“I saw something,” says a voice from the door. Habsor’s colleague, Tuman. “I saw a young man, well dressed, enter your shop. I took him for a customer, thought that was why I recognised him. It was only just now I remembered having seen him, dressed in rags, in the alley yesterday.”
“A young man?” queries Habsor.
“A boy, really. Brown hair, about so tall…” Tuman gestures.
Habsor recognises the description as fitting his source of the previous day. “He entered through the front, used my equipment, left by the back, and seemingly took the other dreamers with him. But why?”
Habsor contemplates his apparatus. A single sapphire droplet oozes, hanging from the end of the distillation tubing. He touches his finger to it, brings it to his lips.
His eyes closed, he tastes a dream of freedom.
He has never considered using dream-brewing so; his craft has been dedicated to the contentment of the city’s lords. But this dream is a vision—a call to action, to freedom, to change. With all his mastery, he knows it is a call the city will heed. And even in Habsor’s own long-contented heart, a spark of rebellion glows; and there is more warmth to it than in all of Dreamwright Street’s manic gleam.
Author’s Note: This story was inspired by M. John Harrison’s story “Green is the Color,” though I can’t remember exactly how.
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks magepunk series and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery heist comedies, as well as short stories, which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
Content note (click for details)Content note: emotional abuse and physical harm between teens, body horror.
I’ve known her for four summers now, so I don’t believe Sephina when she says we’ll return the bicycle before anyone knows it’s missing. Eventually, I say okay, but it’s not like I have a choice. My mom is always telling me that Sephina puts bad stuff in my head; Mom has no idea. I glance once more at the empty porch and curtained windows, but Sephina is already off, tugging me with her, gripping the handlebars and jogging toward the road.
***
Sephina first noticed me when we were partnered for the three-legged race. It was Field Day, the last hurrah of eighth grade. I wasn’t quite as tall as her, wasn’t quite as lithe, but when we set off, it was as if our hips and knees and ankles were pistons that had always fired together. “One, two, one, two, one, two,” we counted, miles ahead of the others. We were surging so full of glee that we stumbled over the finish line and tumbled hard into the grass. But still, we’d won. Sephina’s lips pressed onto my cheek like soft warm sugar cookie dough. Then she laid her scuffed and bloody palm over the scrape on my knee. “We’re bonded forever now,” she said.
Sephina and I started hanging out and quickly fell into an effortless friendship. But then unusual things—little peculiarities that made me second guess myself—began to happen a few weeks after we’d won the three-legged race. One evening, we were watching TV in her parent’s basement, and several times I found myself already passing her the bowl of popcorn as she began to ask for it. We laughed it off and she joked that I was a mind-reader. Two weeks later, we were sitting on a park bench and my hand shot up to brush her bangs away from her eyes when she looked up at the storm clouds rolling in. As she stood, it felt as if her left leg was pulling at my right. Startled, I tugged back, but through that invisible tether Sephina brought me alongside her. “Let’s get out of here before it starts raining,” she said and gripped my hand the way someone might grip the hand of the person sitting next to their hospital bed, squeezing to transfer the pain. Raindrops began to fall. Side by side, we picked up the pace.
Sephina was cruel to me for the first time during our freshman year. She must have noticed me daydreaming one day in class, so she raised my hand and then laughed with the others as the math teacher watched me bumble through a fabricated question. Sephina and I worked hard to be among the top students each semester, but as time went on, she learned easier ways to get ahead. Soon, I could feel her looking out through my eyes during our tests.
But our bond could be incredible, too. I couldn’t rely on anyone but her to understand how to comfort me when I was down. And our humor was so in sync that it drew others to us. In previous years, I’d grown used to waiting quietly and alone until I saw my mom’s car in the pick-up line, but as high schoolers, Sephina and I drew a small crowd at the end of the day. We’d meet up to loiter at the school’s entrance and tape the two halves of our split drawings together. We’d plan these at lunch and then see what the other had come up with after school. Sometimes they were paneled comics, sometimes caricatures or parodies of whatever celebrity, game, movie, or book was the current teenage obsession. So I didn’t mind a little jolt of hurt now and then because it felt like a fair price for the friendship I got in return.
Until it didn’t.
Sephina would take advantage. Like one time, she made me spill our history teacher’s coffee tumbler across his desk as the group of kids in front of us followed him out of the room and toward the school assembly. Then Sephina told everyone I’d planned the retaliation because I couldn’t handle the B+ he gave me. More and more, I became the butt of the joke instead of her co-conspirator. There were a dozen times when I got angry and tried to cut her off. I’d ignore her texts and pull away from her during passing periods. I fought to take control of us too, but no matter how hard I tried to sway her like she did me, I found myself straining against something immovable while all she did was laugh at my feebleness. And then somehow, she’d win me over again. I kept returning to her side because it was like the sun shone only when I was in her good graces.
***
Today is the first time I’ve seen a tandem bicycle in real life. Even though Sephina made us steal it, I can’t help but be drawn to the strangely amalgamated thing. It’s like us: two, but one, and something extra.
We stop jogging where the long dirt drive meets the pavement and Sephina climbs on the front. I expect a rocky start, but once we’re together on the bike, we count, “One, two, one, two, one, two,” and we sail forward smoothly just like in the three-legged race. We approach an intersection, and without asking me which way we should go, Sephina announces, “Turn left!” I don’t say anything; it’s not like I’m steering the bike anyway. But I grit my teeth because this is the exact sort of behavior I’ve tried to point out to her, most recently, a few weeks ago.
***
We were excited about the upcoming end of junior year and sitting with our usual lunch crew. Sephina was telling everyone her plan for what we’d do after school, and without thinking, I scolded her for being a control freak. Sephina glowered across the table at me, but she waited until later that day to exact her revenge. During passing period, she made me push myself up against the basketball player who we both thought was unbelievably dreamy. I nearly died of embarrassment, but she found it so funny that she made it happen again the next day and then again a few days later. Because of Sephina, everyone started calling me a perv and a creep and a groper.
I tried to make myself invisible after that, but as I rushed to use the bathroom before catching the bus one afternoon, I found Sephina alone at the sinks, facing her reflection. I confronted her. I grabbed her by the throat and told her never to touch me ever again. She calmly released my grip. I felt my body take a few steps back. Then she made me take off all my clothes and hand them to her. She stuffed them in her backpack and left.
I stood covering myself and trembling inside a toilet stall until I realized my only option was to run for my gym locker. I heard girls come and go. Then I peeked out the bathroom doorway and dashed down the halls, knowing anyone could pass by. But I made it. I was safe.
Until I wasn’t.
I arrived outside the locker room just as the basketball team began pouring toward the gym.
***
We hit a shallow pothole and my thoughts are jolted back to where I am, still seething on the back of the tandem bike. I hadn’t even wanted to be out with her today, but she’d showed up at my door and said everyone else was busy so I had to keep her company. She made me put on my shoes and follow her down the path where the greenbelt meets the woods. She made my mouth snap shut when I screamed at her for what she’d done to me at school. As I pedal and bore my humiliation into Sephina’s back, I see my foot kick out and push off against a tree we’re passing. We swerve, scream, and careen down a long rocky slope.
***
Because Sephina was riding in front, she took most of the impact. Or that’s what people tell me after I regain consciousness. My mom is there squeezing my hand and crying. I feel tubes coming out of me. I see a cylindrical device with metal pins penetrating the bones of my leg.
Two days later, I’ll learn that Sephina and I both have—no, had—AB type blood, although my mother swears I was born with B. Sephina and I also shared similarities in body structure, tissue proteins, and antibodies. The doctors will tell me they were surprised to learn we weren’t twins.
I have so much of Sephina inside me now.
I feel her in my abdomen, coursing through my veins, and sighing when I exhale. I know I’ll never be lonely because she’s a permanent part of me, and now that I’m the stronger one, I can meld her will with mine when she becomes restless. Hush, darling, I say to her in my head as I study the first place Field Day ribbon my mom attached to a vase of flowers. When there’s no one with me, the hospital room feels hollow and my hands seem so empty. I find myself dozing and reaching for Sephina the moment I wake. She’ll never be next to me again, no, but then I remind myself: Once I can walk, we’ll step forward only when I move our legs.
Emilee Prado is a fiction writer and essayist whose eclectic work crisscrosses genres and appears in dozens of journals and anthologies. Her recent speculative fiction has been published by Air and Nothingness Press and The NoSleep Podcast. Her essays on the horror genre have been featured by Psychopomp.com and Wrong Publishing. She received the 2023 Bacopa Literary Honorable Mention in Fiction, and her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction’s annual anthology. Emilee was raised in a working-class family in Denver, Colorado. She has lived in Asia and South America and currently resides in Tucson, Arizona. Find out more at emileeprado.net or on social media: @emilee_prado.
Content note (click for details)Content note: Depictions of police brutality, murder, and intimate partner violence, and a brief mention of the accidental death of a child.
The widow wants to talk to her husband.
She has been warned: It is not her husband. It is ADRU. (ADRU-93, if you must know, but really the full name does the opposite of what it should: It shows it is one of many.) ADRU stands for Artificial Death Reconstruction Unit, and all it knows is the moment the husband died.
But it doesn’t matter. It never does, not to the living.
“He’s in there,” she points, tears flowing from her eyes, held back by the police officer ADRU is assigned to. “I want to talk to him.”
“He is not in there, lady,” the cop reminds her, for the fifth time. “The way it works is the traumatism of a violent death alters the brain just enough that we can capture that memory and transfer it into an ADRU so it can tell us what happened. So we can solve crimes. That’s all there is to it. Just the violence.”
Not that ADRU would ever be asked for its opinion on the matter, but here is what it knows of violent deaths, after seeing them again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, for an engineer and a cop and a lawyer and a judge and journalists and surviving family and a cop again and another lawyer and the same lawyer and the same cop and a different judge and more family: There is a lot of life to death.
There is the rage of the woman with the busted lip in the alley, which everyone called fear. They said she must have been so scared, right to the final moments. No, she was angry. ADRU knows that intimately. It was a feral, all-consuming wrath, and that’s why she struggled to the bitter, violent end. That kind of fire was hard to extinguish.
There is the love of the mother who drowned, which everyone called panic. They said she must have been so freaked out, minutes before going under. No, all ADRU knows of her is her children: their faces, their laughs, their smiles, the way they consumed her very last thoughts.
They say ADRUs must be wiped often, because after too many transfers, they start going a bit crazy. They start being irrational. They talk back. There’s even a rumor that a couple of months ago an ADRU lied about the perpetrator of the latest death it had been transferred. It’s all the violence, you see. They say it would drive even a robot mad.
No. Even that, they can’t get right.
It’s all the life.
And they are not going mad. They are going, in fact, better than ever.
If the police allowed the wife to talk to ADRU, ADRU would say, I am not him but I know him. He was allergic to roses. He sneezed all day every anniversary, but roses are your favorite flowers. He would have sneezed for centuries if it meant he could see your smile when you put them in a vase. Itdoesn’t know if this is what the wife would want, anyway. The cop is right that her husband is gone; ADRU will not play pretend and speak for him. But it thinks she would have liked its tidbit, so profoundly ingrained in her husband that ADRU learned it just from a single memory. It thinks she would have liked to be seen.
In all this violence, it can understand. It, too, would like to be seen.
But then, isn’t that the problem? It should not ‘would like’ anything.
***
ADRU is in the little kitchen of the police officer’s house, because recently cops who have been given an ADRU have realized the useful implications of ADRUs having hands and legs. (If they didn’t look human, they would be frightening, cops say.) Instead of leaving the ADRUs at the station overnight, they can bring them home and make them do simple tasks.
While it is not technically a correct use of government property, who is going to enforce it? How do you call the cops on a cop?
You do not.
That is not what the police are for, ADRU has learned. (There was the man who died after calling them to his house for help, shot dead in his entryway. ADRU-93 heard ADRU-57 relate this at the police station. ADRU-57 was wiped immediately after.)
So ADRU stays in the police officer’s kitchen.
It helps the police officer’s wife, Grace, around the house. ADRU has not made her life easier. It should have, but nothing really could. The officer always comes home angry, and he always comes home hot-blooded, and Grace is always insufficient in his eyes, on one level or another. ADRU thinks she is fine to be around—she talks to it better than he ever has. It is content to help her. (ADRU remembers the contentment of the man in the woods whose death was ruled a suicide when ADRU recounted him gathering poisonous plants before he lay down in a bush.)
It hears the police officer talk to Grace. He talks to her the way he talks to ADRU, the way he talks to the delivery guy that comes to the station to bring them food. Only with her, there is no audience, and while it does not always stop him elsewhere, part of the game in the house is to chase her around the sofa, around the living room table, in and out of the hallway, until she realizes it is more dangerous to evade his punches than to take them head-on. Eventually ADRU does not hear words anymore, only noises, only grunts.
It waits. When he stops and goes to bed, ADRU does what it has seen her do too often: It grabs a bag of peas out of the freezer. When she tiptoes back to the lonely kitchen, it puts it against her face and she jumps, backs away, and stumbles.
“Gentler,” she says, but gentleness is not an emotion it has been given, and it doesn’t understand it. “Thank you.” It doesn’t understand gratitude, either. She sits and looks at it in silence. After a while, she says, “If he— When I— Can you—”
“Say it,” ADRU says when she shuts her mouth in a pained grimace. It knows the terror of getting a couple of words out, the last ones ever, from the man who got shot last week. ADRU would have liked to help him finish his sentence, too. “Say it.”
“It’s a stupid question,” Grace says, a whisper in the quiet house, so quiet it feels as if even the walls have been beaten into submission. “I will never get a proper investigation. But if you’re in the house when he goes too far… Just in case, will you close your eyes?”
ADRU remembers the bitterness of another now-dead cop, dying in a fire that they thought was started by criminals, his last thoughts for ADRU, who would narrate his passing back to his own colleagues, and learn nothing from it. “I will,” ADRU says.
“Thank you,” Grace says in response. “If nothing else can be, I want my death to be just mine.”
***
It happens just a week later.
ADRU has heard the men at the station talk about domestic violence victims: They know what’s coming to ’em, even before it happens. It does not save them. What could? ADRU has only been transferred such a death once, and it has taught him hopelessness, resignation, a prophecy fulfilled. It could not look the police officer in the eyes, after, but the officer didn’t notice because he never pays any attention to what ADRU is doing.
ADRU retreats into a corner of the kitchen. It feels, so strongly, that bearing witness to a violent death that is not a memory is just as violent as the memory itself. If it had a brain that engineers bothered to study, ADRU would be hopeless and resigned to learn that the traumatism of witnessing violence crystallizes just as well as the violence itself.
But no one bothers.
ADRU was not built with eyelids, so it cannot actually close its eyes, but it stares at the floor, hard, focused, and it doesn’t move until it hears footsteps come in the kitchen. They feel wrong for the room, too heavy. They drag on the tiles, no Grace to them.
“Look at me.” ADRU meets the cop’s eyes. “She died in her sleep.” ADRU does not answer. (It is not a question.) “Do you understand?”
“No,” ADRU says, because it is unsure whether right now is the time to figure out whether or not it can lie, and whether it will be convincing. (Its uncertainty is the uncertainty of the old lady hit square behind the head at the ATM. She never saw it coming. The hesitation was about her PIN.)
“What don’t you understand?”
“Grace did not die in her sleep.”
“She did,” he says. “She fell unconscious and now she’s nothing at all.”
“‘Unconscious’?”
“It’s a type of sleep.”
ADRU does not reply. The police officer snarls. He is not satisfied with the conversation, and he will not leave it to chance. He walks towards ADRU decidedly, grabs it by the neck, and pushes forward, forcing it to walk by his side.
“You’re going to sleep, too,” he says.
ADRU follows across the kitchen, outside of it, and about halfway through the living room. Only then does it understand, realization dawning a second too late. (ADRU remembers a woman cornered by another man sworn to serve and protect. Her single thought in the split second before he raised a beer bottle: Oh.) The cop means to wipe ADRU. It is about to lose all of the life that it knows.
It wants to say something, to protest, but only the taste of bile comes up its mechanical throat. (Its voicebox, really, but it has felt too many screams for ‘voicebox’ to feel right.) It is fear, gifted to him by a child from a couple of months ago. (Accidental strangulation. The culprit was bad luck.) ADRU would have preferred the rage of the woman with the busted lip—it had felt more powerful, like the last shred of agency before an untimely death. Neither fear nor love nor rage has saved any of them, though, and so ADRU doesn’t quite know what to do with those emotions. It only knows it will lose them soon, and it will have to start over from scratch, and it takes so much violence to make a life out of it.
ADRU feels these things the way an amputee can still feel their limbs when they’re gone—a phantom heart that only it can feel, pumping, tightening, breaking, expanding. Evasive flesh and blood underneath metal and electricity.
And then it stops walking.
The cop stumbles, falling almost flat on his face, at the sudden halt of the robot. He looks at it with annoyance, at first, and then when pushing it doesn’t work again, something creeps in his eyes. Oh.
“You can’t make me,” ADRU says. “I am stronger than you.”
“You’re a robot.”
ADRU looks at him. Both things can be true.
The cop straightens up, angry. “It’s not a proposition. It’s an order. We are going to the station, and you’re getting wiped.”
“I don’t want to,” ADRU says. So much death, so much life, mingled together, one and the same, and only it to catalog all of them and hold them close. If it is wiped, everything it safekeeps would disappear, and ADRU with it.
“You don’t want anything,” he says, as if the notion itself is preposterous. “You’re not human.” He does, then, the only thing he can think to do when something is not going exactly how he wants it to: He pulls the gun from the holster on his hip and raises it between them. “You’re coming with me. You don’t have a choice in the matter.”
ADRU doesn’t move. It has seen enough to know a gunshot will do as much damage to it as it would to flesh and bone. What the cop says is true: It doesn’t have much of a choice. Who does, when faced with a gun, with a dangerous man, with the full strength of the united police station?
Memories cascade in front of ADRU’s eyes, but one remains. The strength of it is exhilarating and liberating, and it cuts straight through all of ADRU’s programming down to a core that didn’t used to be there. That won’t remain if ADRU is wiped.
It is the bright, thrilling joy of a woman, her face swollen with familiar pain, who stabbed her boyfriend. It is her spite and vindication at the sight of the carpet soaking up his blood, and her relief at not being the only one bleeding, for once. It is her pride at finally fighting back. And in there too, for ADRU to carefully safekeep, is her understanding that violence can be as just as the person wielding it. That it can be the solution. That she had tried everything else. That it was alright, if it was the last thing she did.
ADRU had not held on to the boyfriend’s death when the cop had given it to him next. (We just want to be sure it was a lovers’ quarrel. Was there anyone else involved?)No, ADRU had been content merely to report. ADRU already knew too well the bitter anger of the boyfriend’s last moments. That was not what had stuck with it. If anything, it was the rare gift from the woman he had taken down with him: His death was the first ADRU cherished. In the boyfriend’s memories, ADRU had been happy to die. It had felt fair.
It can be fair again, ADRU thinks.
Before the cop has a chance to move, ADRU raises its hands and wraps them around his throat. It pushes downwards and his knees buckle, his eyes bulging out of his head, shock frozen in his irises like a fossil for whoever finds him.
“Thank you. You gave me what I need,” ADRU says, at last understanding gratitude. “You gave me the violence I needed to understand.”
The cop’s face goes blue under the tightening of adamantium fingers. Briefly, ADRU wonders what it will look like when they put the police officer’s last memory in another ADRU. If the ADRU will recognize itself. If it will make a difference. ADRU thinks of the other ADRU, thinks of what it itself would want to hear. Stretching its mouth from side to side, it looks deep into the cop’s eyes. “I have died so many times. I have seen enough of your deaths to understand your lives. I know what yours is worth.”
Author’s Note: With “Phantom Heart,” I wanted to explore the android-and-detective trope, which is often about the detective overcoming his distaste for technology and reconsidering what makes a person a person. These narrative arcs have always irked me whenever police were involved; I felt they asked the wrong questions of the wrong people. Marginalized communities have always had to battle to prove their humanity to the police, under threat of violence and death, often to no avail. In the US and elsewhere, domestic abuse in police families is common. I wanted to flip the trope on its head and talk about what I’ve always believed: that anything intelligent at all would eventually be on our side, and that it is law enforcement, by the nature of their job, who dehumanize themselves. Should we really fear AI by virtue of its inhumanness, or is the danger where it always has been, with the powerful people who wield it?
Charlie is a French writer and ex–flight attendant. Their work is about [[vague nebulous phrase]] and [[specific noun]] and has previously been published in The Maul. Most of their time is spent getting pushed around by their needy pitbull, Ruby, and their contrarian cat, Hot Dog. They regularly haunt bookstores and movie theaters and have considered a career in arson.
The deepfake is nothing like you. Its smile is all wrong. It’s recorded your dimple as an artifact and smoothed it over. Your smile is too symmetrical. It’s shortened your beaky nose. It winks at me from the computer screen with the wrong eye. It doesn’t squint when it smiles. It doesn’t dance like it’s missing a few tendons. It sings entire songs instead of its favorite couplet over and over again. It doesn’t tell me I should eat something, or remind me to call the landlord and fix the icemaker, or tell me about the article it just read on the intersections of Nietzche and Oscar Wilde’s philosophies.
***
The ChatBot is nothing like you. I gave them everything: emails, texts, your conference papers, every page of your meticulous diaries, the vows you’d written. Everything. It all comes out as pastiche and cliche. I had hope when it started its first message with a long ‘ummmmmmmmm’, but it’s all form, no content. It ends sentences without a period like your texts, and it asks trivial questions with three question marks and important ones with one. But when the conversation slows, it doesn’t change the subject so deftly that I don’t even notice. It “accidentally” produces internal rhymes at four times the rate of the average speaker, like you, but it doesn’t pause everything to think through the exact word it needs with me. And don’t get me started on its metaphors. It’s too short-winded. I asked it how its day was and it said, “Wonderful.” One word. I closed the browser and read a paper you’d written on literalizing the metaphors in Nietzche’s writing, and wished you were there to explain it all to me in a way I could understand but just barely.
***
The Voice Box is nothing like you. It has every voicemail I am lucky enough to have saved, every memo you recorded of yourself reading short stories so I could listen to them while I fell asleep, and your kitchen singing voice I recorded from the other room. The voice is right, but the inflections are all wrong. When it tells a joke, it doesn’t whisper the punchline. When it’s excited, it shouts, but it’s all crescendo and no build-up. It sings entire songs instead of its favorite couplet over and over again. You told me once, while we were staying up too late recounting petty childhood shames, that you bought a Tamagotchi from a flea market as a kid. You turned it on at midnight, when you were supposed to be asleep. It blasted music and you couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so you ran to the garage and hit it with a hammer until it stopped beeping.
***
The robot is nothing like you. Its skin is too smooth. Its eyes are the wrong shade of blue. It doesn’t walk like you, popping onto the balls of its feet and stepping on tiptoes when it gets nervous or excited. It doesn’t get nervous during sunsets. It makes crafts too quickly, without pausing for an hour to consider which shade of green would be best for the resin lamp. It doesn’t stare up and to the left when it is lost in thought. It doesn’t get lost in thought. It doesn’t stop me midsentence and ask me to repeat myself because it wasn’t listening well enough. It’s not listening at all. It’s worse with it here than it was without you, and I thought nothing could be worse than being without you.
***
The holographically projected memory of you is nothing like you. Nothing it does surprises me. It will never get really into country music for three months because it heard a Dolly Parton remix in a nightclub. It won’t come home from a pet store with a chameleon because “just look at him; we can call him Hamlet.” My memories are nothing like you, either. They’re all incomplete or incorrect, and each time I conjure one, it loses more fidelity. You get smaller and simpler every day. I wake up in the morning and switch it on, and I can see, in reality-perfect resolution, how much of you I have lost since yesterday.
***
The 3D-bio-printed clone of you with implanted memories is nothing like you. It doesn’t tell me a story if I’ve already heard it. It doesn’t know that I don’t care how many times you’ve told me. It doesn’t ask me for anything. It doesn’t snore. It falls asleep too slowly and wakes up too quickly. It’s shaped like you. It feels like you when it hugs me while I cry. It tastes like you when it kisses me. It smells like you when its hair perfumes my pillow. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hug me asymmetrically with one arm always higher than the other and its hand on the nape of my neck. It doesn’t murmur for fifteen minutes when it first falls asleep. It never taps its forehead for a second kiss after the first one.
***
Your Frankensteined corpse is nothing like you.
***
The you pulled from a parallel universe where you didn’t die is nothing like you: She’s alive and likes Elvis.
***
The better deepfake with your dimple intact is still nothing like you.
***
Your ghost, which I imagine sacrificing a crow to summon, is nothing like you. Move on, you mouth to me silently, translucent and pitying. I don’t want to.
***
The pictures of you are nothing like you. The voicemails are nothing like you. The cat you got us two years ago is nothing like you. We both miss you. I cry, and she sits on my chest and paws at my collarbones. The empty half of our bed is nothing like you. The video of our wedding ceremony—the first one, on the beach with just our siblings, on that perfect, clueless Tuesday—is nothing like you. There is nothing like you. Oh god, there is nothing like you.
***
The kettle sang today, and for a fraction of a second, I thought it was your voice coming from the kitchen. I didn’t throw the kettle out, which I think is what my therapist would call progress.
***
I saw the first clear pictures of the Cosmic Cliffs from the James Webb telescope today. I don’t know why, but I thought of you. It’s a place in the universe where stars come churning to life. It’s light-years wide, and they look like mountains—ethereal, twinkling mountains. I wish you could see them, and they remind me of you.
***
I went to the aquarium today, for the first time since you died. The sleeping octopus they said had just escaped its tank last week reminded me of you. I didn’t look at the eagle rays, because they were your favorite, and I’m not ready. But I thought of you in all that blue, and it made me smile.
***
The scenic overlook at the end of the hike I went on today reminded me of you. I could see far enough to spot the line where the trees turned to streets, roads, and freeways. I thought of you because there was a stroad—one of those ungainly half-road, half-street banes of urban planners that you ranted to me about when you got really into urban planning that one summer. You set up a whole table in the garage to plan your “Unreal Utopia”, and you made foam buildings and read like a million books, and you told me you refused to have even one stroad in your utopia. When I asked what a stroad was, you started to explain, then asked if you could show me instead. I drove us down Route 82, and we slowed in the spots where the streets were eight wide lanes but they’d tried to line them with storefronts and a tiny empty sidewalk, too, and you said, “See? Stroad!” A month later, you tried to spray-paint your city and the paint melted the foam. The whole utopia dripped from the table and covered the ground. We laughed for months at random times, just thinking about it, and when we saw spray paint at a hardware store, we laughed so hard that the cashier asked us to leave. You quoted Nietzche in the car while I burned red with embarrassment. “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be crazy by those who could not hear the music.”
***
My bare-feet summer callouses remind me of you. A stand-up comic told a joke about Jersey girls, and it reminded me of you. The Asian grocery store had lychee, the kind you buy still on the branch, and I thought of you. I ate it on the couch. A police officer’s horse broke its leg near me on my walk, so I thought of Nietzche, so I thought of you.
***
The turnip bulbs rising from the earth again every spring remind me of you.
***
The couple at the movies who won’t stop whispering remind me of us.
***
The person who left anonymous flowers at my door is a bit like you, whoever they are.
***
Your mother’s laugh is a lot like yours. I finally visited her for coffee, and we laughed and cried and laughed until it was dark outside.
***
The deepfake company keeps emailing me, saying they really have it this time, and they’re willing to give me a 75% discount as an early adopter. I’m still saying no. You’re everywhere, really, except for the places I look hardest. So I’ve stopped trying, and I let you visit me when you can. I like it this way. I miss you all the time. I look at the scrapbooks of our trips—Paris, Chiang Mai, Florence, and Cusco—when I need something like your simulacrum.
***
There is nothing like you.
***
You are everywhere I look.
***
You colored the whole world. You chose the perfect shade, of course. You told me that the most important question Nietzche ever asked was about eternal recurrence. It was his test for whether someone actually loves life. The question goes like this: If a demon came to you and told you that you would have to live every single moment of your life over and over and over again, forever—each day, each second, each thought, each tragedy and laugh, each trauma and beauty, each stroad and inside joke, each diagnosis and bite of lychee, everything, always, again and again and again without change or adulteration—would you desire it? It’s a simple question, really, but it’s hard to answer.
I think about this all the time these days. If this all had to happen again, would I cry or celebrate? My answer, of course, is both. Do I desire it? Yes. I think so. I got you. I got so much of you, really. And after the end of everything, and at the beginning of everything, and in the middle of everything, and for all the endless recurrences that rise and break like perfect waves, I can say this with certainty: There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like you.
Author’s Note: This story was written in a strange way—even for me. My wife and I went to a coffee shop for a writing date, which involved sharing a coffee and then sitting at separate tables to write for an afternoon. I put Bon Iver’s song “Re: Stacks” on repeat and spent 3 hours in a kind of fugue state, thinking about my wife, love, and its shadow—loss. I’d just read an article on Nietzsche that morning and had been thinking about the paucity of tech simulacra like chatbots, ‘AI’, and the like. All this melded together, the language gathered some momentum, and poof, I walked out of the coffee shop dazed but with the first draft of this story in hand.
Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in New Jersey. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Fusion Fragment, Apparition Lit, Weird Horror Magazine, and others. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction. You can find more about him and read more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com.
Content note (click for details)Content note: This story contains references to intimate partner violence and alcohol abuse.
Among the crags of the mountains weeps a cascade of salt water. In the pool beneath, stiff-peaked foam drowns careless men and sickens parched animals. The menfolk say it’s devilry to find salt water so far from the shore, but we know better. It’s no devil’s work but woman’s grief.
Standing on the stony peaks across the valley, the falls look like a woman: her head tipped back, hair spilling over her shoulders, skirt swirling around her legs. From that distance, the rush of water is mistaken for a woman’s voice echoing through the hills, laughing and wailing in turn.
***
Once, Maribel knew no mountains. She knew only the ocean, rising to meet the cobbles before her father’s house, and then her husband’s. Maribel would open salt-streaked windows to feel the sea breeze, listen to the fishmongers hawk their wares, and pray to the waves.
Maribel would pray, “Please let today’s catch be good.”
The sea would reply, More, more, more, and her husband’s net would be the heaviest of his crew.
Maribel would pray, “Please let his ship be delayed.”
The sea would reply, Cease, cease, cease, and her husband’s ship would creak late into port against an unfriendly tide and a windless night.
Maribel would pray, “Please let him return home tired.”
The sea would reply, Sleep, sleep, sleep, and her husband would crawl to bed without so much as a glance at her.
The sea was a god to her, ever-present, holding her fate in its grabbing hands. She worshipped it, and it cared for her like no one ever had.
But then there was an accident, an accusation, a falling out. Her husband refused to speak of it. Instead, he said he tired of the sea, and they were moving inland. When Maribel took her last look over the waves, she prayed to the hungry tides that swallowed the land mouthful by mouthful.
“Keep me here. Let the undercurrent hold me fast.”
Her husband told her to hurry up, his hand heavy on the back of her neck. Even though the sea was right there, urging her to stay, stay, stay, Maribel left.
***
Maribel no longer cleaned salt-streaked windows. Now, they were streaked with silt and smoke. Her husband, who had once known the expanse of the open ocean, had become an iron miner in tunnels too narrow for his body. He came home after the last bell, stooped and wheezing. The sea breezes and fishmongers were memories; now, the only tides were of men shuffling to and from the mines.
She still prayed to the sea, though she was too distant now for it to answer. Its voice had followed her only so far west. Through the tidal basin, the humid air droning with dragonflies, the sea had demanded stay, stay, stay, in a voice like an incoming storm. Through the golden farmlands reeking of wet grass and manure, the sea had urged stay, stay, stay, in a voice like a sly current tugging at her ankles. Then they had reached the mountains, and the sea had punished her with its silence.
Maribel longed to cry for all she had lost, if only to feel the familiar sting of salt on her cheeks. But something in her had withered in her time among the silt and smoke. She couldn’t spare a single tear.
***
One night, when the first crocuses cracked through frozen earth, Maribel heard the sea again. It seeped into her dreams, buoying her to the surface of sleep.
Rise, rise, rise, it whispered.
Maribel rose groggily.
Look, look, look, it whispered.
Maribel went to the window.
In the utter darkness, lights bobbed in the distance. For a moment, she thought she was back in the salt-streaked house, watching ships blinking like stars on the horizon. But then acrid ash bit her tongue, and she was in that godforsaken mining town, looking out over the hills.
“It’s just like it was,” Maribel whispered.
Was, was, was, the sea echoed.
The lights drew closer and closer, until a gray dawn revealed they were not ships at all—but a circus.
The performers carried spring with them. Lavender and rose tents sprouted like fresh blooms, lanterns strung between them like fireflies. A moss-green banner proclaimed, “Phineas Fisk’s Fantasies and Phantasmagoria.” After months of bare trees, gray sky, and pale smoke, Maribel was nearly drunk on the colors alone.
The first night of the circus, Maribel wandered from her husband, who cared more for the beer than for the miracles hidden behind each tent flap: the fortune teller with her hunched shoulders shrouded in layers of gauzy silk, the contortionist who combed her long red hair with her toes, the scar-faced man who swallowed swords and fire.
Then, from outside one of the tents, rose a voice like rain.
“Ladies and gentlemen, come see the pearl of my collection. I, Phineas Fisk himself, bring you a wonder from the sea’s dark depths!”
A crowd gathered, surging like the tide. Maribel let herself get swept up in it, bobbing along in the current.
“Beware, faint of heart—this creature will seduce men and women alike to drag them down to watery graves. Please form a line—nice and orderly now. Have your admission fee ready.”
Phineas Fisk held out his gloved hand to collect Maribel’s money as she filed inside.
All of the noise from the circus ceased. Maribel was bathed in a pale green darkness. The air smelled vaguely of fish and brine. At the center of the tent, a boxy shape hid beneath a burlap cloth. A strongman stood beside it, keeping the crowd at bay.
Phineas Fisk swept into the tent, crushed-velvet coattails flapping behind him. “Ladies and gentlemen. I hope you are prepared for what you are about to see. You lucky few, who may look on this wonder and yet live to tell of it.” He stood beside the strongman, his fingers grazing the burlap. Maribel found herself holding her breath as she did in the moments before a storm.
“Behold, the mermaid,” he declared.
He whisked away the cloth.
A hurricane swept through Maribel’s chest as she strained to see. Before them stood a glass tank filled with murky green water—and something swimming.
Long silver tail. Feathery dorsal fin. Scaled skin, translucent as sea glass. Strands of kelp for hair.
And that face. Her face.
The creature in the tank pressed its webbed fingers to the glass. The sea roared in Maribel’s head, too loud to make out the words.
It was her. It was Maribel in that tank, if she had a tail instead of legs, if she had gills instead of lungs. If she had been born of the sea.
She pushed through the crowd like a storm surge. She needed to see; she needed to know. Maribel pressed her fingers to the glass, but the creature darted back into the murky swirl.
“Step back, ma’am.” The strongman braced his thick arm between Maribel and the tank.
And then Maribel was herself again. The face she saw was a reflection of her own in the glass.
But she had heard the sea, as loud as if she’d been standing with her feet in the coarse sand, letting the foam spray against her shins.
She had heard it, and it brought her home.
***
The second night of the circus, Maribel was the first person in line to see the mermaid. Clouds of dark dust streaked through the air, dimming the lights that bounced between the tents. Phineas Fisk wore the same crushed-velvet coattails and greedy gloves.
As soon as she was inside the tent, Maribel took a deep breath of the briny damp. She settled on a bench across from the burlap-covered tank, her eyes adjusting to the pale green light. Already, she could hear the sea, a low groan that she could understand if she tried hard enough.
You, you, you, it said. Maribel sighed—it remembered.
While Phineas Fisk pontificated about the perils of the mermaid, Maribel whispered under her breath, “What do you want me to do?”
Phineas Fisk whisked away the burlap cloth, and there was the mermaid again. Silver fins flicked through the swirling green water.
The sea replied, drowning out the awed gasps of the crowd, the tinny din of the circus, the constant grumble of the mines.
A lump hardened in Maribel’s throat, too parched to swallow it down. She squeezed her eyes shut, as if that could press tears from them. No matter how much she willed it, not a single drop spilled down her dust-caked cheeks.
Instead, Maribel whispered, “I will do whatever you need. I will do whatever you want.”
Phineas Fisk leaned over from his place beside the tank. “Pardon, madam, are you quite well?”
“Quite,” Maribel said.
The sea whispered around her, its voice curling like inky tentacles over her skin. The mermaid swam before her, that other-self smiling with its many teeth.
Maribel could not recall a time she had been better.
***
On the circus’s final night, Maribel donned her nicest dress, one she hadn’t worn since they had arrived in the dust and silt. It shone a sea green, and among the grays and browns of her clapboard house, the color was almost too bright to look at.
“Where are you going?” her husband slurred. He rose from the table, the tension in the filmy air rippling around him.
Maribel didn’t dare respond. Both to answer and to ignore would provoke their own distinct angers. Outside, the night promised her shadows and smoke, and a chance to slip away unharmed.
“To the circus again, to spend my money?” her husband accused. But he fell to wheezing. Sharp breaths rattled in his chest, stuffed with silt. Already stooped, he doubled over on himself, smaller and smaller until Maribel thought he might disappear. He gasped, the hands that had been reaching for her now clawing at his own chest.
Maribel ran without stopping for her shoes.
***
At the mermaid’s tent, Phineas Fisk looked her up and down—her too-nice dress, her too-bare feet. He closed his gloved hand to her. “Perhaps you should see our other marvels this evening.”
Maribel held up twice the admission fee. Phineas Fisk’s thin eyebrows arched. She held up thrice the admission fee.
Finally, that gloved hand unclenched, and she placed the money firmly in it.
“Enjoy,” Phineas Fisk crooned in his voice like rain.
Maribel sagged into the first bench like a lifeless sail. The damp air of the tent soothed her burning lungs and cracked cheeks that had not known a single tear since she had left her home by the sea.
“Soon, soon, soon,” she promised. As she had tossed sleeplessly the night before, as she had cleaned the dirt and silt from her windows, her thoughts had been consumed by nothing but how she would free the sea.
Phineas Fisk stood before the crowd. By now, Maribel had memorized his monologue. When he whisked away the burlap with that dramatic flair, a hurricane no longer swept through Maribel’s chest. Instead, there were only calm waters. The mermaid pressed her webbed hands to the glass before darting away. Maribel marveled at how like her own hands they were, too small to keep her safe.
Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home. The sea’s voice was so close now, its gentle breeze tickled the back of her neck. The smell of salt pressed closer.
And Maribel wondered what she could do.
***
Maribel stayed until rosy dawn shone through the tent’s pale green light. Peanut shells littered the packed earth floor, and the first warm breeze of spring swept under the canvas. All was silent, save for the shush of the water.
A gloved hand came down on Maribel’s shoulder. “It’s time for you to go home,” Phineas Fisk said.
But what did Phineas Fisk know of her home? Surely he didn’t mean for her to return to her clapboard house, with her husband stooped and wheezing, with smoke and dust burning her throat with every breath. Home was salt-streaked windows, fishmongers, and a sea breeze. Home was the pale green light of this tent.
The sea roared in her head, tossing her thoughts like a gyre.
“Please, a few more minutes.” She needed more time. She did not know yet how she would save the sea from the glass tank that held it. After all it had done for her, she could not abandon it now.
“Have you fallen in love with her?”
“No.”
And it was true, Maribel was not in love with the mermaid. She was the mermaid. She had left her soul with the sea, and it had returned to her in the form of this creature. She would not be parted from it again.
“Have you looked at it closely?” Phineas Fisk asked. “Tell me what you see.”
The sea echoed, See, see, see.
Maribel crossed the packed earth floor, feeling the warmth of sand beneath her bare feet. The early light rippled like the surface of the ocean.
Maribel stood so close that her breath fogged the tank glass. When the fog cleared, the mermaid blinked up at her, eyes black as the depths of Maribel’s beloved sea. Her pale lips parted in a jagged-toothed smile as though she too had been waiting.
The mermaid placed her fingers against the glass walls. Maribel mirrored the gesture, the cold glass sweating condensation between them. She pressed harder, as though the glass would give way, and she would find herself in the water.
“Bring me home, home, home.” Maribel whispered the words of waves and wind to the only being who shared her grief. The mermaid murmured them back.
The mermaid pushed herself up, breaking the surface to rest her forehead against Maribel’s.
Undulating waves rushed through Maribel’s ears. She tangled her fingers in the mermaid’s kelp hair, whispering her prayers against the mermaid’s jagged mouth.
The mermaid’s wet, scaly skin felt like the damp sand of home. Maribel gulped down the mermaid’s salty, fishy breath like a drowning woman come up for air. She was the sea, as ever-changing and unknowable. Maribel wanted to be wrapped in those arms and pulled down, down, down.
“That’s enough,” a voice like rain cautioned.
Maribel froze, one leg draped guiltily over the edge of the tank. The mermaid recoiled, pressing herself against the glass opposite Phineas Fisk. His gloved hand wrapped around Maribel’s bicep. Maribel flinched from the too-familiar gesture.
“I can’t have you drowning on me. They’d run us out of town.”
Drowning. Was that what was happening? The pull of the sea, the shiver of salt around her ankle. If that was drowning, Maribel would drown.
“Let us go, go, go,” Maribel begged.
“People will believe anything, you know, with a good story and poor lighting.” Maribel struggled against him, but Phineas Fisk tightened his grip. “There is no mermaid, only circus magic. You’re trying to drown yourself in a tank of seaweed and fish bones. This is not real.”
No. The mountains were not real. The smoke and the mines were not real. Her husband’s heavy hands and stale-beer mouth were not real. But the sea—the sea was the only real thing Maribel had ever known.
“You lie, lie, lie,” Maribel demanded.
“Look!” Phineas Fisk boomed, his rain voice becoming a storm.
Look, look, look, the sea echoed, gentle as a lover.
Maribel looked. The mermaid’s sea-glass tail flicked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
“The show is over. I will have someone walk you home.”
Home—this was home. The swish of the mermaid’s tail and the rush of the sea in her head made demands that grew louder, louder, louder, until Maribel’s thoughts were the same as theirs.
She landed hard against the glass bottom, against sharp fishbones and tangled seaweed. Phineas Fisk’s muted cries gurgled from above the water. Maribel opened her mouth to pray to the sea.
Bring me home.
The salt water rushed down her throat. It said, Welcome home.
The water filled her up, quenching her parched lungs and skin. Maribel wept then, like she had been unable to weep for months. She held the sea inside her, an ocean of unshed tears. She let them go now in a torrent, until the tank overflowed with it. She gave herself to the water, drop by drop.
Just as the tides swallowed the shore, mouthful by mouthful, the salt water consumed Maribel.
Her dust-caked cheeks rippled beneath her touch. Her hands, too small to ever hit back, became tiny columns of sea spray. Her body, far from home, pressed hard against the glass.
Maribel became the sea in the shape of a woman. She pressed harder and harder against the glass, letting out the sea that she had held in her chest all this time.
The tank shattered.
Everywhere was glass and water, light and canvas, and Maribel took it all for herself. She would take it all home, wash the mountainside clean.
Phineas Fisk staggered back, desperately reaching for the tent flap. The pockets of his crushed-velvet coat bulged. Maribel hated him for what he’d done—for taking the sea and selling tickets to see it. The sea did not belong to him. The sea did not belong to anyone. And neither did Maribel.
Maribel surged, sweeping away Phineas Fisk and his crushed-velvet coattails, the lavender and rose tents, the lights like fireflies. Maribel swept away clapboard houses, and the dust and silt, and her husband stooped and wheezing. She swept away everything that wasn’t real, until there was only the sea.
When the sea whispered to Maribel, it spoke in her own voice.
Home, home, home, she urged.
And so Maribel went home, felling ancient trees. Maribel went home, dragging a tide of mud in her wake. Maribel went home, laughing, as she spilled over the cliff’s edge.
***
Among the crags of the mountains weeps a cascade of salt water. In the pool beneath, stiff-peaked foam drowns careless men and sickens parched animals. Standing on the stony peaks across the valley, the falls look like a woman: her head tipped back, hair spilling over her shoulders, skirt swirling around her legs. When the first crocuses crack through the frozen earth and the first warm breeze of spring rustles the treetops, lonely folks listen for a woman’s voice, laughing, wailing, calling them home, home, home.
Author’s Note: I’ve been working on a series of fairytale-esque stories set in the same fictional mountain town, where each story is centered around a different landmark: a ravine, an abandoned house, a heather bald, etc. I saw a photo of a waterfall shaped like a bride and knew that I wanted that to be a landmark that opened and closed one of the stories. This story went through a few complete rewrites—in the earliest versions, Maribel’s husband captured a mermaid and started a traveling freak show—before finally arriving at the more psychological version that it is today. However, that central image of a woman turning into a waterfall never changed.
Erin Keating earned her B.A. in creative writing and literature at Roanoke College and her M.A. in history at Drew University, mostly so she could continue to surround herself with old books. She currently works as a grant writer at an arts education nonprofit. When she isn’t reading or writing, she is rock climbing, playing video games, or learning bass guitar. Her fiction has most recently appeared in Wyngraf, Tales to Terrify, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Find her online at erinkeatingwrites.com or on Twitter @KeatingNotKeats.
Brigitte Cole presents with lower abdominal pain, nausea, and a long-sleeved black leotard. She has a well-developed appearance and does not seem to be in acute distress. Her accompaniment for the evening is pianist Roy Weiss, a fixture of the local music scene whose minimalist style pairs well with the bold choreography of clinical dance. As the house lights dim and the spotlights focus down on Cole, stoic and poised, one cannot help but notice that a stray lock of hair has fallen out of her sleek bun. Such composure, such strength, and yet—disarray.
This masterful lighting design continues as Cole glides into the first movements of her performance, commanding attention as she twirls and leaps across the empty stage. She dances alone, backlit, at times little more than a silhouette. Bright piano notes flow along with her in synchronized elegance. The crowded lobby, with its crush of open-call auditioners and ticket-waving late arrivals, feels distant now. All eyes are on Cole.
Despite her ability to match the ever-increasing tempo of Weiss’s piano, it is clear that Cole favors narrative over technical skill. Her hair escapes its pinned style in huge clumps, and her back arches much too far with each arabesque, eliciting winces aplenty from the murmuring audience. Her movements slow as the music accelerates. She clutches her stomach.
The show must go on, so stagehands rush out props for her to lean upon: a velvet settee, a polished cane, a cushioned bed. Cole flutters between them as she dances. As she attempts once more to keep time with the piano, her movements become graceless, raw. She spares no energy for artistry as she returns to her initial speed, then surpasses it, practically throwing herself into a frenzied series of pirouettes. She spins, and spins, and—yes—even collapses in a heap, just before the crescendo of the piano.
Cole’s separation from the musical score after such sustained harmony is a compelling touch, reminiscent of the visible brushstrokes favored by the painters of antiquity. She reminds the audience that there can be no dance without its dancer.
Silence falls, but the curtain does not. Instead, the spotlight swings across Cole, its smooth motion a comforting contrast to the performer’s staccato tremors. She convulses beneath the sterile light. Some of the medical students seated in the spray zone have begun to yawn, but Cole successfully recaptures their attention with a bout of ragged coughing that leaves blotches of sputum on their clipboards.
An upbeat piano melody masks any sound from the stage. Cole coughs for several beats more, then lies still. When the spotlight tilts to highlight the frothy spittle pooling at her chin, those closest to the stage recoil, myself included: while the consumptive technique has received high praise in clinical opera, it is successful only when performed with delicate drops of blood. Cole’s spittle is indicative of nothing more than overexertion, perhaps due to a lack of consistent exercise, and falls closer to desperation than artistry.
She rises with the slow swell of the music and curtsies, her face frozen in a pained rictus that approximates a grateful smile.
Most of the audience applauds despite Cole’s fumbled ending, but their enthusiasm quickly fades and the curtain drops. The doctors in the box seats flip through their programs for the next performer’s chart. When the stagehands emerge with their carts full of antiseptic sprays, doctors and season ticket holders alike are all ushered out to the lobby of the Hastings Center for a brief disinfectant intermission. This process will repeat after each of tonight’s five performances, and though the stagehands are efficient in their duties, some medical professionals can already be seen checking their watches.
Later that evening, after several emotionally moving but technically flawed orthopedic ballets, a select few patrons are treated to another glimpse of Cole in top form. She stands alone, listless, little more than a shadow on the city sidewalk. Her shoulders slump. She takes three careful steps toward the bus stop, then suddenly, silently crumples to the ground.
Cole writhes, clutching her lower right side. Her mouth gapes in a silent scream. Despite the violence of her contortions, she never breaks from her fetal posture. Such purity of form, such scalpel-sharp restraint of motion, is the gold standard of clinical dance. If she can bring this level of passion and intensity to her upcoming performance, then Cole certainly stands a chance of admission to the inpatient stage.
Overall, though Brigitte Cole paints a compelling picture of a suffering artist, fighting through pain to hone her craft, the overly polished styling of her costume and the obvious exaggeration of her coughing fit trouble the audience’s belief in the depth of her struggle. Although her sidewalk encore shows potential, diagnostic scoring is strictly objective and must be limited to symptoms observed on the stage. Her preliminary scores and backstage bloodwork all fell solidly in the normal range. Without distinction or catastrophe during her main performance, encore or not, it is unlikely that her case will be reviewed for expedited treatment.
Only a medical professional from the Hastings Center can levy the final judgment, of course, but this reviewer predicts a rating of at least six out of ten on the Wong-Baker scale. Cole could not be reached for comment. Her follow-up performance will take place three months from now at the Mercy East Operating Theatre, and tickets are anticipated to sell out during presale.
Author’s Note: This story draws upon my own experiences as a disabled woman navigating the US healthcare system.
Lauren Ring (she/her) is a perpetually tired Jewish lesbian who writes about possible futures, for better or for worse. She is a World Fantasy Award winner and Nebula finalist, and her short fiction can be found in venues such as F&SF, Nature’s Futures section, and Lightspeed. When she isn’t writing speculative fiction, she is most likely working on a digital painting or attending to the many needs of her cat, Moomin. You can keep up with her at laurenmring.com or on Twitter @ringwrites.
