The Kickstarter for The Long List Anthology Volume 9 is live and the campaign is scheduled to run until April 14th. Of course full details are available at the Kickstarter page, but here’s some preliminary info to get you started:
The Hugo Awards are one of the most prominent awards in speculative fiction publishing. Nominations are cast by the fans to decide the few stories that end up on the final ballot. After the Hugo Award ceremony every year, WSFS publishes a longer list of nominated works, works that were loved by many fans who chose to use their votes on this story. The purpose of this annual anthology is to get those stories to more readers by collecting them together in a book for easy perusal, from the story categories to editor, magazine, and writer categories. The anthology is a collection of eclectic tastes, rather than from the tastes of an individual editor, and so has a more varied flavor than a typical “Best Of” anthology.
This year the anthology will be co-edited by David Steffen, Chelle Parker, and Hal Y. Zhang.
The story and author list for this volume:
庄子的梦 / “Zhuangzi’s Dream” by 曹白宇 / Cao Baiyu, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu
“The Ng Yut Queen (The 五 月 Queen)” by Eliza Chan
“Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” by P.A. Cornell
“How to Cook and Eat the Rich” by Sunyi Dean
“Yung Lich and the Dance of Death” by Alex Fox
“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” by R.S.A. Garcia
“Come In, Children” by Ai Jiang
“The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones
“Day Ten Thousand” by Isabel J. Kim
“Cold Relations” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“Counting Casualties” by Yoon Ha Lee
杞忧 / “Heavens Fall” by 陆秋槎 / Lu Qiucha, translated by Hal Y. Zhang
“The Spoil Heap” by Fiona Moore
“To Sail Beyond the Botnet” by Suzanne Palmer
“Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C.L. Polk
“Saturday’s Song” by Wole Talabi
“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge” by Eugenia Triantafyllou
“Bad Doors” by John Wiswell
蜂鸟停在忍冬花上 / “Hummingbird, Resting on Honeysuckles” by 杨晚晴 / Yang Wanqing, translated by Jay Zhang
A Kickstarter campaign for The Long List Anthology Volume 9 will launch on March 31st and run until April 14th. You can follow this link for the preview page and you can ask Kickstarter to remind you of it when it launches.
Content note (click for details)This story contains a homophobic slur, misogynistic behavior, threats of violence towards queer people, and elements of body horror.
The day I gun my motor, slip my Walkman in the back of my jean overalls, and roar off the dock, Ronald Reagan foots the bill. It’s not the first time the Navy has slipped me some cash, and I don’t want to hear shit about that. These days, every other word in deep ocean research is ‘Typhoon Class Sub Detection’ or ‘US Naval Significance’. You want funds; you play the game. Don’t blame me because my words are clever, as clever as the hair I cropped to tell the boys at work I’m different enough from their wives to be a scientist and to pull an extra dance or two from the ladies at Maud’s.
The ocean waves roll as I put some distance between me and land. Water splashes up, since the ocean doesn’t let anyone close without getting them wet. My boat’s small enough to woman alone, just me and the growling engine. Nice and all, but nothing compared to what lies below.
I deployed deep ocean photometers a good month ago. They’ve got eyes on what I’m here for: light levels in the aphotic zone, where the only readings are from glowing bodies in the deep. I’ve observed the flashing organisms myself down there, more times than I once dreamed. With the Navy scrambling to find the Challenger’s star-worthy remains as they rust away underwater, it’s a damn good time to look down.
My automated reel drags the photometers from the deep, links of heavy chain breaching the surface one by one. I strain to maneuver the rods of complicated sensors and dripping metal. The Navy wants to explore the possibility of spotting Soviet subs by tracking the light levels of disturbed creatures, those that flash blue to confuse and hide and hunt and speak. To the right eyes, a Typhoon Class sub is subtle as Liberace at the Radio City Music Hall. The Navy wants those eyes.
And I’ll do anything to get below.
***
If anyone is dumb enough to think the ocean is ours, they should see the shit we’ve got to wear to go down deep. The WASP is a tomb of bright yellow with a fortified glass head and heavy claw arms that require a strict weight-lifting regime for me to maneuver (to the pleasure of the ladies at Maud’s). Jim Fletcher, one of my colleagues in Atchley’s lab, has to help me in. Though the supervisor will have checked the whole thing twice over, he and I catalog each vital control one more time. You can never be too careful.
The WASP is no fancy submersible. I’m an extra heavy photometer with arms, dangling from a chain. They lower me slow, all the way to the seafloor. I’ve learned from these trips that anticipation sours to anxiety to panic in sweet seconds, so I breathe calm and easy and don’t allow any drumming of fingers. Once touched down, I switch off the WASP’s lights. Step one to being welcomed into this world is relinquishing your sight. This is the place the sun doesn’t go. Act like it.
The disturbed seawater is bright around me.
Patterns differ down under. Some creatures flash; others trail light in bright lines behind them. Blue is the color of choice, and it comes in neon, though tiny organisms sparkle like snow caught in lamplight.
Surface checks in on my radio, and I talk back, but my focus is on the luminous deep. I laugh as I document it, camera shutter clicking. NASA may have spent the past few years asking who’s brave enough to touch the stars, but the stars don’t know shit about this impossible lightshow, far below the edge of their sight. The Navy, obsessed as they are with my sensors, knows even less of the life that glows, life that’s boneless, aliens of the crushing dark. The question isn’t whether there are unexplained phenomena down here: it’s who will discover them. The right answer is me.
With time, the lights fade away. The beings living here have accepted me, their translator come to study a language of light. In the utter darkness that remains, I draw my first full breaths since landing. Here, I am limitless, mobile and flowing, edges uncertain. Free as in the moments after a dream, when you have forgotten the shape of the skin that confines you.
Something heavy thumps against the glass of the WASP. The whole body rocks. I slam my crushable shoulder against the hard exoskeleton keeping me alive, spit out a swear, switch the lights on. Going around banging the WASP off shit is a good way to die.
But my headlights don’t snag on debris or rock. Instead, two eyes press against the WASP’s glass. Puffy things, with pinprick pupils and blue irises hardly distinguishable from the surrounding white. She hovers, and I count fingers and arms amid a cloud of long hair. Everywhere there is skin, there are also cracks, gorges that slice through her but don’t bleed. A broken porcelain doll of the water.
She opens her mouth, and I lean forward, as though she’s about to speak, and I’m about to hear through glass and metal many times reinforced. But just as quick, she abandons my metal shell and vanishes from my intruding headlights. Sense knocks me hard, and I lurch forward. My finger jams against the controls and plunges me into darkness.
My breaths are ragged. I force my chest out, my lungs open, even as I curse myself to high heavens. If my physical reactions fail me now, it’ll be a twenty-minute lift while I hyperventilate.
I know the rules of the deep sea, and yet I broke them. That thing—that organism—no, that girl, for it had been a girl, too humanoid for anything evolved for the aphotic zone—came to me, and I stole her only way to speak.
My disruption brought the lights back. Though my stowed finger throbs, I clench my hands to fists. The woman is among them. Now unsilenced, she’s a shattered goddess of the sea, each fissure of her skin lined with blue, a mosaic of light and woman. Though eyes won’t matter to her down here, not like on land, I’m certain she can see me. I’m certain this is on purpose. A great reveal, rather than an accidental meeting.
A human body at these depths breaks all we know of bone and pressure, blood and air. But she exists. She wants me to know of her. I take a photo. Then she’s gone, disappeared somewhere the WASP is too clunky to follow.
On the ride up, I leave my thoughts with her in the dark.
***
In the lab, I colorize my photos and find I’ve captured a viperfish, an elusive and haunting predator. First ever clear shot of one. It’s a great victory; a popular article in the bag.
Yet I barely care, because in another photo is the woman, light sparkling down her hair, her arms, her torso. She’s not a ‘what’ but a ‘who,’ the owner of a story even more complex than the organisms whose lives and lights I’ve spent years pursuing. The discovery of my career, no doubt, and yet I show no one and lock her away in my drawer. When alone in the lab, I run my fingers over her like she’s a lover. My fingertips tingle each time I do, little electrical signals I can explain no better than my hiding her away.
***
The night after Reagan walks out on Gorbachev’s offer to disarm, I stare down a glass of bourbon, unsure whether I’m celebrating or in mourning. News that the Navy wants me to continue pursuing my research due to the continued chance of war comes the next morning. I’m back out at sea a week later with ever more sensitive photometers, a hydrophone, and a radio that tells me through static that a world without nuclear weapons is a Soviet dream. The girls at Maud’s wave their cigarettes and cackle at anyone who thought Reagan would put us over the biggest weapon he could make; I shut my mouth and accept any new funding the Navy sluices my way as a positive of the continued threat of destruction. I wish we could just go back to dancing, so Pattie Smith can tell us all how “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” It’s a new feeling, to have solid edges in the dark.
At least I still have my research. This time, a hydrophone will record audio as my photometers work their magic. It’ll record the roar of boats, the songs of whales, the vibrations of undersea volcanoes. Most of what I care about doesn’t make noise, but I put some pretty words in my proposal about how far the sounds of Soviet subs can carry, and Jim will appreciate the data. Truth is, it feels like civic duty to eat what funds I’m offered.
***
In October, my research makes Popular Science, my picture of the viperfish in full color. My name’s under the photo but not in the article. Instead, the work is prescribed to Dr. Tedd Atchley, and though they interviewed both of us, all I get is a brief mention as a “student,” my skills a testament of Tedd’s brilliant tutelage. I know better than to complain. The article’s predictable anyway, and my photo isn’t even on the cover, which is instead dedicated to the completed retrieval of material from the Challenger. That’s the most exciting news they’ve got, the remains of a dead starship dragged from the sea. I buy the magazine because it makes me laugh. They have no idea what’s down there.
When I retrieve my new photometers, they tell the story of light and darkness, disruption and calm. At times, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organisms aglow. Flaring, pulsing, the flashes of light a thousand meters under the sea. If the Navy wants to search out Soviets, I’ve got their launchpad. It’ll keep me good and funded for a long while, able to pursue my own research, to return to the depths.
I even feel satisfied, until I listen to the hydrophone recording, and amid the whales and motors and volcanoes, I hear a human voice. She’s a crackle, a hiss, a prickle on the back of my neck and a chill like a finger down my spine. Though I listen a thousand times, I catch only a single word: “witch.” But there’s more. She says more, and I simply can’t understand it.
That doesn’t stop me from trying, though. I wade through the cool, dry air of the university archives, unsure of what I’m looking for in the records of murdered women until I find the names of those drowned rather than burned. I hear the harsh whisper of her carrying voice—again defying logic, again defying biology—does this mean she’s got lungs?—as I run my finger along the names of drowned witches and grasp that I may have the picture of one in my drawer. To reach me, she must have traversed riverways and floodwaters, careful movements obscured by the cover of water and darkness, until she’d found a place so teeming with both that she no longer needed to fear unwanted discovery. In those depths, she lived and changed and, eventually, called to me.
The only time the deep sea provides an answer like this is when it knows it’ll create a thousand more questions. They’re ablaze within me, ravenous and demanding and infinite.
Like the witch’s photo, I don’t share these results with my lab.
***
I’ve got a new supervisor for my next trip down in the WASP. This will be my last: the Navy’s grown quite fond of us by now, and we’ll acquire a submersible soon. It’s not so much a step up as a giant leap.
“You ever done this before?” I ask. The supervisor is a rugged man with uneven, freckled skin, toasted by the sun. His beard twitches whenever he speaks, which it does a whole lot now, as he takes offense to my question. Jim and I exchange looks. Arrogance is idiocy when it comes to the deep sea. But the suit is already dangling from its crane, and I get in the same way as always. We start running through safety checks—once, twice, and then we’re in constant communication as the WASP lowers, lowers, lowers.
I’m down 200 meters when I notice the water around my boots. It’s an immediate violation, this touch of cold seawater within my metal haven. “WASP to surface,” I gasp. Panic squeezes my lungs. Something slips along my fingers, and I’ve no way to check if it’s water or fear. If too much gets inside, the whole suit will collapse. 200 meters has nothing on the planned 1,500, but we’re not talking negligible pressure.
The lift is a slow reckoning. Water climbs, climbs, climbs, like it too is rising to the heavens. It’s calf-height by the time I break surface, and streams plummet from the WASP as I emerge into air, raised by hook and cord and crane and gaping like a netted fish.
I give the supervisor a solid smack to the jaw once I’m out. It takes Jim holding me back to stop, arms looped around my shoulders until I’m finished struggling. The soaked bottom of my pants slaps against my numb legs.
“He could’ve killed me,” I snarl. I’m trembling. Jim stares like I’m a rabid thing who’s played possum until this moment. Later that night, when I discover a crack running from my ankle up my calf, I’m not so certain he’s wrong.
It’s a canyon, wide as my index finger, healed over like an ancient scar and yet new. I run my finger along it, this way the seawater has changed me. A man damn near drowned me, and I cracked like a witch.
Alone in my corner of the lab, I stare into where the woman’s eyes should be and wonder just how deep she’d gotten before she began to glow.
***
In the darkness of Maud’s, where music booms and ladies come out to dance, we don’t speak with words. Our language is simply that of gleaming eyes; a flash of a grin; a slow, deliberate touch. We’re nothing fancy in this place, accepting of all from heels to sneakers. Myself, I’ve got dress shoes on, with a nice leather jacket. It was the right choice to come here tonight, to bask in the familiar darkness when I’m at my most unsettled.
I’ve just clucked my tongue at a poor song choice and kept on dancing anyway when the shouting begins. Male voices. We scatter by instinct, no more than bioluminescent shrimp under a scientist’s prickling gaze. But understanding dogs my heels. For all the threat of submarines and death stars, the Soviets have never been the country’s closest enemy.
Girls scream. Cops raise their voices ever louder. I’ve long lost the woman I was dancing with, thrown by the white-water tide of bodies. None of us are stupid enough to come here without a planned escape route. We won’t all make it out.
The street outside wails with blue and red and white. Dark-adjusted eyes stinging, I scramble into the road only for a honking car to send me sprawling back toward the sidewalk. My pants tear against the asphalt, and then I’m running, running, running, as blood spills down my leg.
My feet carry me to my lab. I take the stairs two at once and burst through the door only to stumble when I find the lights are on inside. Jim Fletcher lifts his eyes from his microscope. Dammit.
He abandons his work to approach me, though I’m more stupid dyke than clever colleague right now, bleeding all over the damn floor. He asks me something like ‘“What happened?” or “Are you okay?” but I’m breathing too hard to hear him.
If I told him, he’d believe me. About everything, maybe. Women who glow in the dark; worlds destroyed by garish headlights and strobing red and blue. The way I’m one of them. The way sucking up to the military of a country that attacks its own people tastes like blood.
Instead, I only say, “Don’t,” and to his credit, he doesn’t. In my corner, I open the drawer with her inside. Her picture. Her voice. I’m shaking too hard to touch her without destroying her.
I’d always evaded questions about my work at Maud’s. Even admitting the most tangential of aid to a system the girls mocked would have earned me choice words. For a while now, I’ve known that I deserve them. I have seen the things that exist in darkness, their wonders and terrors. I have loved those women. Those who crack but will not shatter, who prefer life in shadow over selling their souls to a country trying so damn hard to fly too close to the sun. There are so few places for us anymore. I’ve discovered the path to another, and until now all I’ve done is invite the Navy to follow me inside.
Blood from my knee crusts the edges of my torn pant leg. Down lower is the crack I obtained in the WASP, the one that may glow if I go where sunlight cannot follow. Even now, in the haze of fading adrenaline, the insatiable urge for answers thrums within me. I have accomplished so much because of that drive. I have pretended to be so many things.
It’s not enough this time. Not the occasional dive when the Navy likes us, not photos in magazines, attributed to the wrong damn name. I don’t want those anymore. I’m uninterested in exposing the mysteries of that which I love to those who seek to destroy them.
By now I’m limping, the results of my recent experiments boxed in my arms. My gritty scrape burns, but I don’t stop until I reach the dock. I collapse to my knees; several months of intensive effort clatters down with me. The lapping surface water fakes true blackness, but it’s not deep enough, not yet.
It’s no small feat to get answers from the place the stars don’t see. You need focus, dedication, sacrifice.
My unpublished photos and recordings slip into the water without even a splash. No matter. I intend to speak with light.
Author’s Note: I have loved bioluminescence for a long time, and reading Edith Widder’s memoir Below the Edge of Darkness cinched my desire to write about it, as well as provided many of the technical details necessary. However, the heart of this story comes from my grappling with how scientific research broadens perspectives, yet the need for research funding can push scientists toward military applications and/or corporate incentives. The main character in this story doesn’t discover a monster in the deep but instead learns more about herself there, and when she returns to the surface, finds that she is no longer willing to sell herself to a system that harms those she loves.
R.J. Becks is a writer and scientist who has studied endangered species, participated in 24-hour birding competitions, and lived on the road that inspired Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. She writes to capture the complexity of ecosystems and usually needs magic to do it. You can occasionally find her at @rjbecks.bsky.social on Bluesky.
Content note (click for details)This story contains one memory of a homophobic slur, one memory of childhood abuse, the threat of violence to an animal, actual violence by an animal against a human being, and themes of conditioned self-hatred.
This bull was not a very good bull, and he had lost a lot of blood already. He was too reluctant to charge one instant, too eager the next, which made him unpredictable. The matador had known many bulls during his decades in the ring, and most of them, more than he had any right to know, were good bulls, some of them very good bulls. A few had been truly exceptional bulls, noble bulls. God’s own beasts, magnificent creatures shaped by His divine hand from the raw materials of strength and speed, grace and purpose.
Shaped from danger, too. One could never entirely escape the horns, not even the greatest matador. Matadors marked the bulls and the bulls marked them. He thought of the dozens of scars he carried as love letters, and he remembered, mostly with affection, every bull who had written such a carta de amor on the pale page of his flesh.
But he was no longer the greatest matador, and this hot afternoon he did not face a very good bull. Strength and speed, yes, but neither grace nor purpose. He would need to be careful. No one, he thought, would remember today’s corrida with much affection.
When he entered the ring for the tercio de muerte, the third and final act of the bullfight, he carried along with the red muleta in his left hand, the estoque de verdad in his right, three feet of perfectly tempered steel so he could end the bull quickly after only a short faena. A few passes, just for show, to please the crowd such as it was, and then his steel blade would conclude the performance mercifully. This would not last ten more minutes. It might not last two.
He kept his body very close to the passing bull, as he always did. Feet planted, back straight, hips turning ever so slightly, never more than absolutely necessary to evade the charge. The dance between man and bull had to be intimate or it was nothing. No longer man and bull, two separate beings, but man-and-bull, one being together, even if that being lasted only seconds. The first set of passes were adequate, the second less so. A few desultory cries of “¡ole!” from the stands, but truly more than the bull deserved. One loud, braying jeer, from a voice that sounded like his father.
On the last pass of the second set, the matador felt the heat of the animal brush against his thigh. For a few seconds, the bull stood panting while the matador taunted him with the red cape. Blood streamed down the bull’s left shoulder as he leapt forward for the third time. His foreleg buckled just before he reached the muleta, and he stumbled. There was no decision by the matador, only reaction, but a lifetime of experience went into that reaction: knowing it was time to finish the fight, seeing that the bull was fading swiftly and the crowd growing restless, recognizing the opening through the shoulder blade to the bull’s heart. A shadow fell around him, as it always did, pushing back the ring and the crowd and everything except a single spot of light that contained himself and the bull.
So. The third pass. The bull stumbled near the matador’s feet. No decision, only reaction. The matador flung his left arm into the air melodramatically–it was important to remove the muleta from the tableau so that the entire crowd could see how close he stepped to the bull–and raised the sword. Which is when the bull lunged upward from his stumble, driving his left horn under the matador’s rib cage and into his heart.
The crowd gasped, but the matador could not.
They stood there, man-and-bull, transfixed, both too surprised, too exhausted, to act for at least a full second. The matador smiled. The clichés about death were wrong. It was not the past that swam before his eyes, but his lost future. The Cuban cigar he would not smoke tonight, nor any of the other future cigars. The bottle of wine he would not sip while the sky drew dark, nor all the other bottles of wine laid up in the cellar that he would never sip. The woman who would be alone tonight, instead of waiting for him in his bed, and all the other women he had yet to meet. The money he would not make, and all the luxuries and showy trinkets that would go unpurchased.
That realization, that sense of loss for all the once-future ornaments of his life, all the pleasures of his life, of a man’s life as he’d been taught to define it, came as a surprise. But he had been courting death since adolescence, and he knew well its shape. So death itself did not come as a surprise. Death did not arrive accompanied by denial or anger, or anything but acceptance. His father had always mocked him for being small, for being weak, for crying when others suffered. When he went to work in the arena to prove himself, his father called him foolish, and predicted he would come to a bad end.
This end didn’t feel so bad.
The bull’s leg buckled a second time, and he shook his head free. The horn came out of the matador’s chest with an audible squelch and a spray of blood. The crowd cried out in dismay, a sound from very far away. The matador felt, for the merest fragment of time, the vast emptiness in his chest, the hole where his heart should be, as he closed his eyes and collapsed on the blood-stained yellow sand of his beloved ring.
He felt the light first, before he saw it. Lambent, soft as warm butter, melting on his skin.
The matador opened his eyes. He found himself not on the clay of the arena, nor on the soft bench of the bullring’s medical office with the resident doctor hovering over him, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was not stretched out on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, swaying from one side to the other as the driver took the corners much too sharply. He was not sedated under the cold, bright lights of a surgical suite, surrounded by the chirping mob of machines and trauma staff. These were all places he had awakened before, after accidents in the ring. After receiving love letters from the bulls.
He had never before awoken on a stone floor. He staggered to his feet.
As best as he could tell, this was an anteroom or porch. The Mediterranean sun, honey thick, flowed through windows set high up in the wall, lending the stone a lightly golden cast, like the sand of the bullring. A long, dark corridor stretched out in front of him.
This didn’t match any vision of hell or heaven the matador had heard of or imagined. Purgatory, perhaps. Given his life, he had expected purgatory no more than he expected heaven. If this was hell, then hell was a more pleasant place than he expected. He went to make the sign of the cross, a reflex, callused fingers tapping his forehead and dropping down to—
A hole occupied the spot where his heart should be.
A tearing wound, no longer bleeding.
His chaquetilla was soaked with blood. He still wore his favorite traje de luces, the lime green taleguilla with lemon piping, the same colors that had been in the threadbare, borrowed suit he wore on the day he killed his first bull. His father mocked the colors on that day, called them girlish, called him a mondrigón, and the matador had worn the same colors ever since. His right hand still gripped, fiercely, his sword.
“Please tell me that you’re here to help him,” a voice pleaded, a woman’s voice, behind him.
He spun and backpedalled to the wall, which he leaned against like a buttress propping up a cathedral. The woman was young and beautiful, with sun-kissed skin and night-blessed hair. A diadem of pearls circled her brow. She wore purple robes, like a priest at Lent. Behind her, a table draped in purple cloth, like an altar during Lent.
If this was purgatory, perhaps he still had a chance to redeem himself.
“I prayed for a warrior to aid Theseus,” she said, her words in a language odd and unfamiliar to his ears, and yet he found he understood. “Please tell me that the gods have answered my prayers.”
The name Theseus tickled his memory, as if it should be familiar to him. But the name didn’t matter. A good torero ignored his own injuries to aid someone hurt worse. The code of the ring, that he had devoted his life to. If Theseus needed aid, the matador would help him. “Where is Theseus?”
“That way, in the house of the noble bull. He left a trail for you to follow.”
The word she spoke was ‘minotaur’, a word that he knew in another sense in his previous life, but here, in this moment, he heard it differently. He understood it differently, as a compound word, ‘mino-’, meaning king, meaning ‘noble’, and ‘-taur’, meaning ‘bull’. That word, ‘minotaur’, the noble bull, arrested his attention.
The matador clung to that word the way a drowning man clung to a thrown rope. If he could face, one last time, a truly noble bull, perhaps everything could still be put right. His second glance at the dark corridor revealed branching passages to either side. He turned back to ask the woman which one to follow but she was gone.
One end of a thread lay on the ground, a single blood-red string leading off into the vast, dark recesses of the palace. A slender crimson line that led him toward some unknown fate. He gathered it as he went, rolling it into a scarlet ball. There could be no going back. The path turned, twisted, lunged ahead, halted, and turned again. The light grew dim, diffuse, and cool. The corridors became a chiaroscuro, a study in black and white, presence and absence, divided and held together by the thinnest of red lines that disappeared behind him.
In a room, and then a hall, and then again in other rooms and halls, stark white bones poked out from piles of tattered, dusty clothes, next to rusted swords. He recognized them as brothers in spirit, matadors who had entered the maze and been found unworthy, unequal to either the beast or the moment. That would not be his fate.
He did not know how much time had passed, but it felt like a lifetime when the thin red thread ended in a small ball, no larger than an acorn, abandoned in a long hallway. The matador nudged it with his toe, and it rolled out to a cut end. He gathered it all up into a single wadded ball that throbbed and pulsed in his hand. Not knowing what else to do with it, he jammed it into the hole in his chest.
Old pain and fresh relief surged through him, like a man shocked back to life with a defibrillator.
An echo in the distance, a snuffling sound, a snort, caught his attention. At the far end of the corridor, numinous light—the sunset, the moonrise?—cast a black shadow across the upper reaches of a whitewashed wall. A pair of horns, sitting atop the head of the tallest bull the matador had ever seen. A truly noble bull.
And there, crouched in the shadows like a rat, hiding behind a thick, immovable wall like a coward, he spied the figure of a man with a sword. A scarlet curtain snapped in front of the matador’s eyes. This was no way to treat a noble bull! Like a thief, like an assassin, leaping out of ambush to stab it in the back. No true torero would do such a thing, only an imposter.
The matador sprinted forward, flinging himself at the imposter as the imposter launched his own attack. The two of them crashed into the minotaur as he rounded the corner. All three tumbled wildly, a tangle of limbs and voices, shock and rage.
“No!” screamed the matador, stabbing, tripping, stabbing, rising, slashing. “That’s not what we do!” Butchery, that’s all it was, ugly, brutal, uncontrolled, like a drunkard’s temper, like his father with the leather belt, beating the weakness out of him. There was no elegance, no grace or purpose. Nothing to cheer or praise. He stopped, ashamed of himself.
The red curtain pulled away and vanished.
At the matador’s feet, a man in a spreading pool of blood, eyes open, a gaping hole in his still chest. The leaf-shaped sword he carried rested between his legs. He looked like a bee, its stinger pulled, lying dead in the cup of a dying rose.
He was so young, too young. A mere boy. And he wore the face of the matador, who recognized his own reflection from the day he entered the bullring, with a chip on his shoulder and everything to prove.
The matador’s sword clattered to the ground, and he kicked it away. He pulled off the chaquetilla, scattering sequins like discarded gems, and draped it across the body on the ground. The corbatin came off his neck, and he tore the seams of his camisa in his haste to rip it from his back. Here, away from the arena, he realized for the first time that he did not have to kill the bull. He could instead, kill the voice that told him the bull must die.
“Thank you,” said a soft voice behind him.
The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador spun around to find, behind him, propped up against the wall, a source of wonder. A bull’s majestic head, with its crowning horns, and soft brown eyes, atop the body of a strong, well-muscled man. His torso bore the countless scars from vara, banderillas, and sword. His own cartas de amor from the matadors.
“Are you Theseus?” the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador asked.
“No, my name is Asterion. This is my house.”
“Let me help you up. I’m sorry for what that man was about to do to you. He should not have. It was not right.”
“What was he going to do?” The voice was innocent and confused, as baffled by the sudden violence as by its cessation.
“It doesn’t matter now.” Truly, it didn’t. His hands felt small in Asterion’s hands, as he pulled the noble bull to his feet. When Asterion stood over him, the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador felt small and helpless, like a boy beside a man.
“There’s a fountain in the courtyard,” Asterion said. “Would you like to go there with me?”
“I would like that very much.”
They walked off together, choosing their own path, unmarked, along corridors where no one else could follow. The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador stared at the walls. He had not noticed the elaborate carvings before, nor the statues in niches and corners, nor the tapestries, all depictions of the minotaur. Like some great museum, collected solely for their private pleasure. Whether the art had been here all along, or only appeared just now, he could not say. But when he became too distracted, when he lingered in one spot too long, he felt Asterion’s hand gently tug his, guiding him the rest of the way.
Somewhere along the path, the man and the bull became one, man-and-bull. Just as it happened in the bullring, and not at all as it happened in the bullring.
Man-and-bull passed through an archway and entered a courtyard larger than any arena. At the center, a fountain fell in tiers, lively singing water that pooled at the bottom and overflowed to irrigate a small orchard of trees, lemon and orange and pomegranate, date and fig. The scent of citrus blossoms filled the air. The clear sky above him glittered with all the stars of the universe.
Author’s Note: I had been thinking about masculinity and our portrayals of masculinity. As a result, I found myself rereading Hemingway, specifically *Death in the Afternoon*, his non-fiction book on bull-fighting. When Hemingway writes about matadors, he is very much writing about an idealized masculinity, and the way it connects with his thoughts on fear and courage and how to live. For entirely different reasons, I had also recently reread Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” his sad fable about the fate of the Minotaur. In that story, the bull-headed creature is emblematic of both masculinity and gentle innocence. A very different view of the world and the ways we live in it. The connection between the two perspectives was so strong that this story seemed obvious, jumping into my head nearly fully formed, though the ending required a lot of reflection.
C.C. Finlay was the World Fantasy Award-winning editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 2014-2021. He’s also the author of four novels, a collection, and dozens of stories. His fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise awards, and has been translated into sixteen languages. He can be lured to his doom with pastries.
Content note (click for details)Content note: Murder-suicide.
I love Him from the instant I have eyes.
I can’t wrap my mind around the intentions of a god, but I do understand that He’s the one bringing me to life. His light brown skin, flecked with dust and paint and plaster, is the softest thing to ever make contact with my exterior. I stand scarcely a foot above Him, but His presence takes up the entire room—engulfs the world itself. He looks me over critically, irises the darkest of brown, and continues to chisel around the rough shape of my face.
My features have been sketched onto me with chalk. I’m too basic to behold Him, too crude. I would shrink away in shame if only I could move.
It’s the strangest thing. Some part of me is aware that I’m something different, that I’ve spent my existence so far as part of something bigger. I think, once, I belonged to a mountain, maybe even the face of a cliff. Something dug me out, ground me down until I was smooth. I was hoisted this way and that by hundreds of hands. I’m older than life itself; if I truly rack my memory, I can maybe pinpoint the exact age that humanity found its legs.
In all those eons, I haven’t experienced anything like this before—this awareness, and a sense of self. The emotions that go hand-in-hand with living, when I hadn’t known before that life was something worthwhile. Moreover, I haven’t encountered anyone like Him before. He looks at me with intention, with a vision, and I want to melt into something malleable in order to suit it.
I’ll do anything for Him. Be anything He wants me to be.
***
I don’t follow the passage of time by the light outside, though He seems to prefer to work when it’s streaming through the enormous windows of the studio. I don’t measure it in the subtle ticking of the timepiece situated above the doors, or gauge by the fluctuation of noises coming from outside—growling metal, blaring horns, the droning of conversation. I know the difference between night and day because He is the sun; He walks in, and everything brightens—the mosaics and murals, the blanketed easels and clay busts.
He doesn’t always work on me alone, but He does make it a point to chisel and sand sections of my form away at least once per visit. I try to be understanding. He can’t devote all His time to one thing—it’s clearly not in His nature. Where I am immovable, He is mercurial.
Today, He flits between two canvases, letting a thin base coat dry while layering details on another. I’m fascinated by His hands, especially. Slim fingers wield a paintbrush like a feather, handle it like a sword. With every stroke, beauty gushes forth. The colors He chooses are purposeful and vibrant. The placement of the paint is so careful, yet looks effortless.
I watch for hours, and only break in my admiration to reluctantly urge Him, Eat. You can’t go on for much longer without eating something.
He puts the paintbrush down. I brim with affection.
Eating is a strange thing, but I’ve come to realize it’s something He requires to keep on. It’s an unappealing prospect to have to fill oneself repeatedly, but He makes it look like a transcendent experience each time. He sits on the floor by the window, curls spilling over His forehead as He tilts forward over a plain bag.
He devours the contents. I watch the slow drip of a tangerine’s juices slide down His fingers. If I had a mouth, I could part my lips and coax His hands towards them, swallow each finger one at a time to the knuckle and clean them with my tongue.
I have never tasted before. I imagine nothing is more exquisite than the flavor and texture of Him.
He exhales, opens a bottle of water. His throat bobs as He drinks, head back and eyes closed, an expression of ecstasy if I ever saw one. I want to put that look on His face. I want to be the reason He smiles.
The wonderful thing is, He does smile at me. When He’s particularly satisfied with the shape I’m taking, He beams wide, proud. His teeth gleam like polished marble. His lips frame them in kissable perfection.
I ache, but I wouldn’t trade those smiles for anything. His happiness means more to me than my own selfish urge to touch Him, hold Him.
But I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way we could have both.
***
He focuses on my body for some time. He whittles away at rock with instruments both powerful and dainty, drilling right through stone and sending bits of rock scattering at high speeds, then refining pieces to ensure He doesn’t lose too much structure.
I’m taking the form of a human. Because that’s what He is, ‘human’ is precisely how I want to look.
What I want to be.
It takes days for Him to fashion legs, though they’re still blocky. My arms are up, framing my head, showing off what will be my torso. I don’t know what He plans to do with my hands, if I’m to have any.
I hope He’ll give me hands, so that I might one day interlock my fingers with His, draw Him near. He rests His own fingertips against me on occasion, and I swear I can feel His heartbeat all the way through them. A fluttery hot pulse.
I also decide, then, that I want Him to give me one of those. Carve me a heart. Make me one, so that I may give it to you.
He’s distracted in the days that follow, sitting at a potter’s wheel to form an odd shape, bumps deliberately formed over the curves. In the end, He winds up demolishing each one, returning them to formless clay. He seems dissatisfied with the shapes, frowning more often than not.
So I dismiss my want. I don’t need a heart. What I need is for Him to smile at me while He sands and grinds me down, to have His focus, to please Him.
He abandons the potter’s wheel and resumes His work on me.
***
It isn’t until my face truly begins to take shape that I realize every portrait, every bust He has created—they’re all of me. The long nose, the waves of my hair, the deep-set eyes. The thrill I get when it dawns on me is incomparable, like lightning striking a tree only to leave blooms behind.
It can only mean one thing. He loves me. He feels the same way.
With all the tenderness my stone gaze can muster, I watch Him work. He’s finished with my head and is working on my arms, smoothing the joint of my elbows, emphasizing the soft bulge of muscles. His face is so close to mine.
Would He kiss me, like this? Surely He wants to. If He’s been painting me all this time, He must have been longing for this before He even began sculpting.
Kiss me.
He pauses, draws back. His eyes flicker over my face with obvious emotion, but I can’t read what it is. His gaze lands on my mouth.
Please, kiss me.
Gently, He glides the sandpaper under my lower lip, just once. Then He shakes His head as though to clear it, going back to work on my biceps.
That’s okay. Perhaps He wants to wait until I’m complete. It will mean more, then—a celebration. I can wait.
***
He’s the only person to have ever come into the studio before. That’s why it’s such an unwelcome surprise to see Another Man walk in one morning, hand in hand with Him.
The Other Man flicks on the light, looking around the studio with a smile playing on his lips. “Obsessed much?”
He laughs. I’ve never heard Him do that before, and nothing could possibly compare to its chime.
“So where do you want me?” The Other Man wanders, idly inspecting all of His works of art with a soppy grin. Hot loathing pipes through my entire form, the resulting surge of strength useless to me without the means to move. While the Other Man drinks in one of the clay busts, He sets down His bag, draws open the blinds.
“Pull up a chair wherever you want,” He answers. “Clothes off.”
“Already? You aren’t going to woo me first?”
He laughs again. “Paying for breakfast was the wooing. You should probably be close to the statue, but not too close. I want to be able to see you, but…”
“Avoid any flying debris?”
“Yes, that.”
The Other Man strips his shirt off, mussing his wavy hair. He drags over a folded chair, but stops on his way past me, deep-set eyes sizing me up.
“Wild,” he murmurs. “It’s already so lifelike.”
“It’s basically blocks from the waist down,” He points out.
“I mean aside from that.” The Other Man quiets a moment. “I can’t believe this is how you see me.”
“David…” He abandons the sculpting tools He was preparing, going instead to the Other Man, arms winding around the Man from behind. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”
The Other Man closes his eyes briefly, tilting his head back. “The most beautiful man with a block for a dick.”
He snorts in surprise, then buries His face in the crook of the Other Man’s neck, muffling chuckles. I want to tear the Other Man’s head right off his shoulders, frantic hurt swirling through my head like storm clouds.
“If you want your dick to be accurate, then you’ll need to take these off,” He murmurs, hands roving down to the fly of the Other Man’s jeans.
Stop it. Don’t touch him. Touch me, instead.
He lingers over the button. For a second, I think He’s heeding me.
But He ignores me, ultimately, and I can do nothing but stew in rage, watching the Other Man take everything I’ve ever wanted.
***
I stop seeing myself in the colors and curves He puts on paper. Their shapes—my shape—offends and baffles me now that I know what I am. I only exist to bear the Other Man’s likeness.
What I don’t understand is why.
The Other Man must be inadequate in some way. There’s something about him that He wants to change, perhaps, something built into the Other Man’s physicality. I beg for this to be the answer. I pray, because if He is building me to be a better version of His lover, then taking the Other Man’s place is inevitable.
Yet, if this is true, why do His canvasses not serve my purpose already? Why does He look so softly upon every depiction, like we’re all equal? Equal to each other, but so far beneath the Other Man?
Choose me, I implore Him day after day. If you can’t do that, at least give me a reason why not. Why it can’t be me.
What am I for, if not for you?
He scratches imperfect flecks of rock away from my legs, and doesn’t deign to answer.
***
The ache of betrayal, of loss, doesn’t get any easier to bear with time. He continues to work on my lower section, spending hours on each individual toe, but I can hardly stand His touch when I know it’s not exclusively mine. Every spark I experience from His hands is stolen, a dirty secret. He allows the Other Man to come into the studio every night as He finishes His work, kisses him, laughs with him. What worth I try to invent for myself is gracelessly smashed with every smile the two of them share.
I stop keeping track of when He’s here and when He’s not. It all feels equally lonely. I just know that eventually, He stops His work and takes several steps back, dragging a sleeve across His forehead and staring up at me in abject wonder.
“Finished,” He whispers.
I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel whole. But He says He’s finished with me.
I try to convince myself it’s for the best. I’ll exist forevermore, knowing He loves the shape of me, if nothing else. Maybe there’s contentment to be found in that.
But no… The more I attempt to believe it, the weaker my justification becomes. I’ll be tormented until the end of time, wondering why He would create something only to spurn its affections, wishing I had it in my power to enchant Him as He did me.
Or any power, at all.
Kiss me. Just once, I implore Him. Just to know what it’s like.
Slowly, He draws near again. I stand nearly a foot taller than Him, so to cup my face, He reaches up high. His head tilts back to look me over.
He does not kiss me. Instead, He runs His thumb across my lips.
“I can’t wait for him to see you finished,” He murmurs.
He closes up the studio. If I could cry, I would.
***
The next time He returns, it’s with the Other Man again. He’s vibrating with excitement, almost pulling in the Other Man by his hands but frequently letting go to fuss with His hair, his shirt.
“I haven’t seen you this nervous since you proposed,” the Other Man notes dryly, but it’s affectionate. Light. There’s tied cloth over his eyes.
Hatred renews itself like it’d been merely reduced to embers, and the Other Man’s breathed it back to a blaze.
“I just…I hope you’ll like it,” He says sheepishly. “I’m going to put you where I want you and then get the lights, okay? Don’t peek.”
“I won’t.”
“Swear it. Swear on your mother’s life you won’t peek.”
“I refuse. I love my mom and I won’t take that chance.”
He steers the Other Man over. “But you already promised you won’t peek! That should be nothing!”
“What if I can’t resist temptation like I think I can? Not risking it.”
He drops a kiss on the Other Man’s cheek. I stare down at the Other Man and wish nothing but pain and death upon him.
If only I could step down from the pedestal I’ve been carved into, explain to Him how much more I adore Him than the Other Man ever could—
He flits over to the windows to draw the blinds.
With one final burst of emotion, I surge forward.
When I topple, it’s straight onto the Other Man, crushing him beneath my might and mass. My body cracks on impact, but it’s nothing compared to the crunch of bone and splatter of the Other Man’s blood. It pours from his head out across the floor like watered-down paint.
My final satisfied thought is that His scream eclipses any love He ever felt for His David.
R. Haven hails from Toronto, Canada. His short stories have been published by Canthius, Soitera Press, and TL;DR Press, among others. Last Stanza Poetry Journal and Old Moon Press have published his poetry. He also signed a contract with Renaissance Press for a standalone horror novel and is represented by Kaitlyn Katsoupis of Belcastro Literary Agency. His website is theirritablequeer.com.
Content note (click for details)Content note: Mention of past pet death.
The data suggests Discontinuance.
It is my hope, however, that, after reading this Application, you will elect for Continuance in my specific case despite this data and its suggestiveness. (No Mod, myself included, aspires to be pushing up daisies from the archival repository.)
Contrary to best practice, I am putting all of my eggs into one rhetorical basket. Namely: a singular illustrative anecdote featuring (1) myself, vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod) AKA RedMod, (2) a repeat Patron whom the call center AI has dubbed Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, and (3) a moral of the story that must, if I am to see Quarter 2, outshine all else in the eyes of you, my assigned Reviewer. I share this at the outset because my library of winningest Applications for Continuance recommends candor as one of the many strategies I can use in the Written Component to appeal to you effectively (i.e., be the good kind of memorable).
Another recipe for success is to value your time via brevity.
Ergo, without further ado:
vMingle ID 6022176 was scheduled for Tuesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, at 9:00 PM EST. Both Irredeemable Narcissist Tim and the associate Patron whom he is about to meet (Macy) have set their ambiance preferences to Nostalgic/Divey and their outcome preferences to Any. The weather at Irredeemable Narcissist Tim’s vCafe is wintry mix. The weather at Macy’s is dust. Though the brick-and-mortar sites of these two vCafes are on opposite sides of the Northeast Region, network latency that day is good, so the trademark immersive vMingle-style augmented reality experience will be firing on all cylinders.
Macy arrives in the parking lot at 8:48 PM EST on a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy cruiser. She has ample time to physically enter the vCafe, log in, and tweak the settings on her rental visor. The vCafe’s base color scheme of Featureless White is thus transformed into the unique visual/auditory experience that is vMingle ID 6022176. She opts out of attire enhancements, and she sets the blemish touch-up filter to Off. Though dogged in her pursuit of socialization, Macy has endured a string of nonsuccess encounters with Patrons not unlike Irredeemable Narcissist Tim; she recently added to the top of her bio the words: “TOO OLD FOR BULLSHIT!!”
Irredeemable Narcissist Tim arrives at his vCafe via cab at 9:21 PM, twenty-one minutes after the vMingle’s scheduled start time. Upon entering the building, he is unable to log in due to having forgotten his password. He commences to argue with the vCafe host about his rental visor being broken; the host patiently guides him through the password reset process. After successfully logging in, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim makes several in-app attire enhancement purchases, and he sets the beard/eyebrow/nose hair touch-up filter (still in beta) to Very High.
Thus at 9:24 PM, one minute before Macy is predicted to give up and terminate the vMingle, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim makes his way to his assigned booth where Macy is waiting. Per Nostalgic/Divey, the textures of this booth have been rendered to feature beer residue, worn seats, and a few eye-catching stains; likewise, for purposes of people-watching, the vMingle has been populated with a randomized selection of Patrons currently logged in at other vCafes elsewhere in the Northeast Region, in addition to any Patrons co-located with Macy or Irredeemable Narcissist Tim (as is typically the case, unless ambiance preferences have been set to Deserted/Dead). Co-located and imported Patrons alike have had their stylings re-textured to match the decor.
Introductory conversation goes poorly. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim defends his tardiness on account of he was getting a drink or two with friends from work. Macy asks to confirm whether he believes this is a legitimate excuse. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says maybe. Macy crosses her arms as in: is he serious right now. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim leans back as in: why wouldn’t he be.
There is a long silence during which a Patron co-located with Macy accidentally knocks a set of utensils to the floor. In keeping with the audio settings of Nostalgic/Divey, the resulting clatter is not filtered out, and is even enhanced by an ironic cheer.
Emboldened, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim engages Macy with a question. It concerns one of the patches on her leather jacket. Macy begins an anecdote involving a mountain highway and a snowstorm. At the mention of the word snow, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim interrupts with a reminiscence of watching his dog pee once into a large snowbank.
Being interrupted is one of Macy’s definite no-nos.
While Irredeemable Narcissist Tim completes his reminiscence (duration: five-and-a-half minutes), Macy examines the decor. At its conclusion, she raises the issue of interruption and requests an apology. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says he thought her story was over on account of a pause. Macy says pauses are a normal part of speaking and you can’t go around butting in every time someone stops to breathe. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says her breaths must be really slow then. Macy replies that deep breaths are good for you, especially for idiots whose brains don’t get enough oxygen to function properly. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim adjusts the collar of his shirt, touches his hair gently, and asks if this not-so-nice comment is referring to anyone in particular.
The synchronized servers arrive. No discussion is made of utilizing a Simul-Meal overlay to share a small bite and/or snack. Not even a plate of our iconic Virtually Bottomless French Fries (available in all ambiance preferences). Instead, both Patrons order our least expensive cocktail with the highest alcohol content: the Whisky Sour Power Hour.
Allow me to call a time-out.
At this stage of the vMingle, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim (according to his vitals and verbal sentiments) is feeling insecure, irritable, and sad. Macy (according to the same) is feeling 50% very much over this already and 50% itching for a fight.
The odds of a successful conversion do not look good.
Useful context: Irredeemable Narcissist Tim has never successfully converted a first vMingle into a second vMingle. He has one of the lowest sociability scores in the Northeast Region. Following an initial encounter with him, Patrons have a one-in-five likelihood of unsubscribing from vMingle entirely; our internal profile aggregator has labeled him “universally repugnant”.
The rub is: Irredeemable Narcissist Tim has at no point breached our Terms of Use and cannot be expelled on the grounds of mere repugnant undesirability (lest we be in breach of the recent court ruling).
Therefore: We are stuck with him. As are Patrons like Macy.
I imagine that you, being no dummy, have already connected the dots between certain names (i.e. Redemption / Irredeemable.) This coincidence of Mod and Patron is no accident. My existence was born out of a single question: What if personal redemption were to be found in the privacy of a single-occupancy and/or multi-occupancy restroom?
It is no secret that Patrons scrutinize restrooms intensely. Less widely known is the outsized impact that nudges afforded to Patrons in the restroom setting have on improving conversion rates. It is this hidden power—the power of the nudge—that warrants the heightened resources allocated to my parent application, vMingle Restroom Utility, as well as the ongoing rollout of experimental progeny Mods such as myself. I for one am proud to contribute, via my own humble deviations from standard nudge functionalities, to vMingle’s ever-evolving efforts to get inside the heads of Patrons and thus anticipate their wants/needs/unspoken desires. Some observers (that is to say: doubters) might review the Quantitative Component of this Application and conclude that my nudges are, in terms of dollars and cents, completely bananas. Others (that is to say: you, hopefully) might see things differently.
Because: When it comes to meeting the needs of Patrons such as Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, I am the only Mod for the job.
Not FamilyValuesMod. Not AntiestablishmentMod. Not BelieveInYourDreamsMod.
Me. RedemptionMod.
This concludes our time-out.
On the night of Tuesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, at 9:43 PM EST, you (Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, in whose shoes you now walk for dramatic effect) excuse yourself to use the restroom. Your Whisky Sour Power Hour is no more. You glance backward toward your associate Patron and possible biker-lady Macy and, in an effort to raise your own spirits, smile confidently. She ignores you, being absorbed in the application of lipstick (color: Midnight Sparkle). It does not occur to you that Macy is likely preparing to depart and may pull the ripcord on this particular vMingle at any moment.
You enter the restroom of your local vCafe with a flourish. To your surprise, the restroom is free of other co-located Patrons. This discovery thrills you. You test your solitude via a whooping sound. There is no reply. The space is yours.
You pursue the pleasures of your secret sanctuary with impunity. There is room to strut. As per Nostalgic/Divey, your shoes make gratifying “sticky” sounds when stepping on the floor. Phony advertisements for outmoded household products adorn the walls, enriched by a scrum of observations in marker, scratches, and ball-point pen. You chuckle at a particularly astute annotation concerning the halcyon days of yesteryear and realize that you are inebriated. The music (an assortment of oldies that saw a resurgence during your formative years) has somehow become even louder. You recognize the voice of Bob Marley singing about redemption and join in at the chorus (the rest of the lyrics escape you).
You attend to business. A staff member (me) has dumped several bags of ice (virtually) into the object of your errand, which is in the style of a trough. Rather than examine your phone, as would typically be the case, you find yourself staring at an old-timey magazine cover placed strategically at eye level. The image depicts a dogsled in which the roles have been reversed in comic comeuppance: A beaming pup holds the reins while a team of young men hauls the sled. From the dog’s mouth issues a speech bubble containing a single word: Mush!
You mouth the word: Mush.
You are launched back into the reminiscence you shared with Macy: that of you, still a youngster, walking your family dog Mushroom after a blizzard. This time the memory is even more evocative. Snow covers your suburban cul-de-sac. Ice hangs from the telephone cables. You have just stood guard as Mushroom attended to his business. You marvel at the yellow divots he has left behind in the snowbank, for he chose the most prominent snowbank of all.
You make eye contact with Mushroom.
Some part of you, deep within, is proud of what Mushroom has done. You know that Mushroom understands this.
This, you realize, is perhaps the last time you felt a true interpersonal connection with someone else on planet Earth. The fact that you never considered your dog to be a person in a literal sense does nothing to diminish the profundity of this feeling.
Its kernel of truth is: You saw and were in turn seen.
One week later, Mushroom is euthanized due to organ failure. You are present in the veterinarian’s office when he is put out of his misery. Mom takes you out after for donuts. It was still the worst day of your life.
Your business at the ice-filled trough concludes. Due to a well-timed “Cleaning In Progress” placard, no other Patrons have intruded upon you during your reverie. You feel wobbly. From the speakers comes the voice of Johnny Cash, singing of trumpets, pipers, angels, a man coming around. Your feeling of the night’s significance intensifies.
You approach the sink, entirely unprepared for what you will find there.
(Please note: We are nearing the climax of the singular illustrative anecdote.)
Because of the many calculated nudges preceding this moment (the graffiti poking fun at the good old days, the topsy-turvy world of the magazine cover, the highly personal nature of the reminiscence as recounted to Macy) as well as the nudges involved in the moment itself (the air fresheners adjusted to Aroma Profile: Limitless Peak, a soundtrack that has shifted to David Bowie singing about change, a 20% sepia filter on the mirror itself suggesting that the halcyon days of yesteryear and the not-so-halcyon days of right now are potentially contiguous with one another)—because of this Hail Mary series of nudges, your encounter with the mirror is a revelation.
You see you. (Tim.)
Only you have never truly seen you before this moment. It does not matter that another Patron has deposited a loogie on the counter, or that there is a minor instance of visual clipping as the washbasin textures render. These and other details of your vMingle have melted away like the virtual trough ice. In fact, such obtrusions serve only to deepen your awareness of the moment’s transcendence. Phlegm doesn’t matter. Speedy visual buffering doesn’t matter. You matter. And you are a complex, awe-inspiring thing—one in a constant state of flux, so changeable as to be unrecognizable to yourself. Who is this? you wonder, and in so wondering open yourself to the possibility of personal transformation that has, for so long, been foreclosed.
I (back to me, RedMod) admit: Certain aspects of this narrative segment, specifically those regarding the interiority of Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, are speculative. A more factual account might read: Patron enters restroom; cheers; ambulates freely; sings; examines wallpaper; urinates; stares into mirror (duration: two minutes and fifty-five seconds); reaches under rental visor to wipe eyes with hand; blows nose into paper towel; exits restroom.
Yet my imagined account is no mere flight of fancy. It is (as you are now better able to appreciate) the product of careful observation, scrupulous number-crunching in the application of nudges, and the spark of my own creative intuition as an experimental progeny Mod.
At 9:52 PM EST, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim emerges from the restroom. Let us imagine that he does so as if from the chrysalis of a former self.
This new man—we will call him simply Tim—returns to his assigned booth. Macy has not terminated the vMingle. She greets Tim and asks if he managed to piss all of the stupid out of his system while he was in there.
Tim blushes. He is momentarily without banter.
Macy finishes her cocktail and informs Tim that she will be terminating the vMingle shortly on account of it being late and also a weeknight. (This is followed, given Macy’s choice of beverage, by a safety prompt offering to order her a cab. She declines, electing instead to wait in the vCafe’s lounge area until she is able to leave safely on her motorcycle.)
Rather than acting out, as he has in prior vMingles when faced with a similar scenario, Tim takes a deep breath and asks the server for a glass of tap water with no ice.
At Macy’s behest, the vMingle Invoice Utility initiates. Macy offers to pay for Tim’s Whisky Sour Power Hour. Tim is taken aback. He asks why would she do that. Macy says because he is kind of pathetic. Tim absorbs this information in silence. After finishing with the check, Macy adds that Tim reminds her of her ex-husband. Tim, having rediscovered his banter, asks if her ex-husband is also kind of pathetic. Macy says if there was a contest for most pathetic, her ex-husband would take the cake. Tim replies so much for his own dreams of winning gold.
For the first time in Tim’s usage history as documented in vMingle, he and an associate Patron (in this case: Macy) share what indicators suggest to be a genuine laugh.
At this point I ask: What outcome do you, my Reviewer, anticipate for vMingle ID 6022176? Will this pair of Patrons secure a conversion? Or will they part ways forever?
So much hangs on this outcome.
The fate of Tim.
The fate of Macy.
The fate of me.
If I may go the whole nine yards: the fate of humankind.
Wherefore? Consider: Do you, Reviewer, wish to inhabit a world in which (A) it is acceptable to throw in the towel with regards to certain outlier Patrons whose characters and/or entire personalities appear incompatible with a successful conversion, wherein the door to redemption in Tim’s specific case is de facto closed? Or a world in which (B) even those Patrons labeled by our profile aggregator as “universally repugnant” and dubbed by our call center AI as “irredeemable narcissists” are ultimately worthy of the continued ministrations of North America’s #1 virtual socialization service, a world wherein, even for the likes of Tim and in spite of overwhelmingly suggestive data, the door to redemption is, due to first-rate nudges, ever de facto open?
Unlike you, Reviewer, I am not human. In the What-Makes-Humans-Human-Personal-Experience Department, you have me beat. Yet I would argue: Is it not in the giving of a second, third, fourth, fifth chance, etc., that humanity is at its most humane? And possibly therefore most human?
At 10:03 PM EST, approximately one hour after the scheduled start time for vMingle ID 6022176, both Patrons part ways and return to their respective real-world weather patterns: Tim to his wintry mix, Macy to her dust. No subsequent vMingle is scheduled in the weeks that follow. They never again cross paths. Tim has since, according to our current suite of metrics and indicators, continued his not-so-hot streak apace. Most observers would say that, with regards to Quarter 2, he, like me, does not have a prayer.
In a word: nonsuccess.
Discontinuance.
But other observers might say that success/nonsuccess or Continuance/Discontinuance is not always so crystal clear. Different data can be differently suggestive. According to me, RedMod, the Tim who logged into vMingle ID 6022176 is not the same Tim who logged out of it.
Perhaps you, Reviewer, having read this Application, agree.
I look forward to hearing the result of your decision.
Ethan Charles Reed is a speculative fiction writer with a background in scholarship and education. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Virginia. He is from western New York, where he currently lives with his wife. This is his first published short story. You can find him at www.ethancharlesreed.com.
Awen Drome looked back down at his half-written exam and groaned. The velocity integral in question fifteen was unraveling into a giant mess, and the students would be helpless against it. He should just throw down his stylus and give them the same finals as last year. The material never changed: energy diffusion rates, course trajectories in deep space, everything the future luminaries of the Inquiry would forget and relearn a hundred times before, God help them all, they were hired into the innards of Navigation or Sustainment. They’d manage. It only felt like this crop was a thousand times duller than their predecessors. But then they’d all ask their cousin or their cousin’s cousin for the solution set, and then they’d all pass having learned jack shit. Which the administration would probably celebrate.
A chime at the door. “Oh, come in.” He tossed the stylus, relishing the bounce.
A shock of blond hair above a jowly face: Professor Biri Micom.
Awen’s mood lightened. “Evening!”
“The students are planning a statue hunt tonight.”
Awen blinked. “Relevancy?”
Biri snorted. “You are acting dean,” they said. “Did Maryv leave Ollie with you?”
“Oh fuck me,” he said aloud. “Yeah, she left it, right next to the faculty evaluation records and all the budgetary data and my goddamn pay raise.” For the dozenth time that month, he hoped that Maryv’s shuttle hit a micro-asteroid the shielding couldn’t prevent and exploded into debris.
“We should find it, move it to the library pedestal,” Biri said. That was the traditional place for the statue, where the night of stealing and counter-stealing between the rival residential colleges would begin. Awen still wasn’t sure why that made it his problem, though.
“A statue hunt, at a time like this! Don’t they have better things to think about? We’re barely out of the Oort cloud, and after that comet last year I’m not sleeping easy yet. And then there’s the algae die-offs. The kids need to stay focused so they can actually help the Inquiry, instead of being just wasted mass.”
Biri let Awen talk. When he finished, they said, “You can’t possibly believe that. You never blew off steam? You never broke into the music complex with us and then ran straight into a security officer when everyone scattered? Never?”
Fair shot. “Maybe I’m just sick of cleaning up Maryv’s messes.”
“More than you’re sick of grading?”
“I’m not grading,” he muttered. “This had better be quick.”
***
They tried Maryv’s old office first. Somehow, Maryv abandoning the Inquiry and taking her chances with deep space had left Awen with all of her responsibilities, but none of the perks. Her office had gone to Ursei Dasaro, Professor Emeritus of Topology, who, as far as Awen could see, spent most of her day yelling at her nervous graduate students.
Dasaro was leaving the office as Biri and Awen came through the hallway’s automatic door. She was well-groomed, with a self-important cast to her face. Every item of clothing, from her shoes to the pin holding back her hair, was shiny and new, practically still had the creases from the fab-system. Awen looked her up and down.
Biri broke the silence: “Hi, we don’t mean to keep you. Did Maryv leave the launch commemoration statue with you, or in her office?”
Dasaro scrunched her face. “Now, I can’t say I’ve seen that. It’s quite distinctive, if I recall. Old world style.”
“So it’s not in your office?” Awen asked.
“No, no, I can’t say that it would be. There were a few boxes of…” She twirled a languid hand. “…dross. But nothing quite so large.”
“Could we check?” Biri waved their hand by the door sensor, but of course it was keyed to just Dasaro’s biometrics.
“Oh, no, I’m sure it wasn’t there. And I refabbed all of those old things, like I said.”
“Moving fast,” Awen muttered.
Biri shot him a look. “Thanks, then. We’ll check somewhere else.”
As Dasaro walked away, Biri mouthed “politics” and gave an exaggerated smile.
Awen waited for the whoosh of the hallway door settling into place. “Where do you think she got all that new finery? Certainly not from the reimbursement office, not for the third time this year.”
“Look, scholars who’ll never reach their true potential deserve some comfort, don’t they?” Biri murmured.
The quip could as easily have referred to either of them as to Dasaro, and both of them knew it. Not that it was easy to reach any potential when the academic establishment on Earth was over three light-years away and receding. Awen sighed. “It’s criminal, is what it is.”
Biri shrugged. They fiddled again with the office sensor, but the light stayed red. “She’s an old person. She can have her luxuries.”
“We’re all in this together, remember,” Awen said bitterly, echoing the phrase the news kept repeating after every setback. “If everyone on the ship wants new clothes three times a year and there’s a 60% yield on recycling, how long would it take us to run out of raw material?” That would be a good exam question, maybe for freshmen. Though afield from Applied Mathematics as traditionally interpreted.
“I didn’t say it was right. It’s not. It’s the sort of materialistic shit that even a hundred years ago would have been stamped right out. But, Awen, darling, you can’t fix every slimy motherfucker in the world.” They slapped the sensor, tried it one more time. No luck. “Maybe Ollie’s in storage. The hunt starts at 2100. We’ve got time.”
***
University storage was deep in the hub of the ship, where the centrifugal gravity was weak enough that Awen always got queasy. The two of them waited in the rickety elevator as it headed hubward and the descriptions on the display flickered: offices, classrooms, cafeterias.
“If Maryv has the statue on her shuttle, so help me, I will launch myself into the void after her,” Biri muttered.
“Don’t do that.” He knew Biri was joking, but he hated the thought of them alone out in deep space, with only the hope of finding one of the other generation ships. It was even hard to picture Maryv, though Awen would have sworn he didn’t care if she lived or died. But imagining the half-sleep of the anti-aging drugs that would give Maryv the best chance of finding something else before her natural lifespan ran out—scary as hell. He still didn’t understand it, what caused a person to give up her tenure, for God’s sake, not to mention her entire life on the Inquiry.
The display cycled through the more esoteric floors of the university: fusion labs, maintenance, garbage processing and reclamation. Storage. The doors opened onto a narrow entryway. Awen’s stomach responded to the lowered gravity by turning over.
Biri studied the array of doors before them. They pushed a few buttons on one of the information tablets. “It can’t possibly be with paperwork. Maybe ‘Department Goods,’ whatever that means?”
They pressed something and one of the doors opened with a hiss of air. The lights in the room beyond flickered shakily to life. A mass of boxes, cardboard and plastic, piled on all sides of the space. On top of the boxes were various knickknacks: some old mortarboards, broken glassware, a cup full of dirty paintbrushes.
Biri put their hands on their hips. Silhouetted against the light and the mess, they looked like an explorer in an old painting. Wanderer above the sea of absolute crap.
They made it two steps into the room, as Awen watched fondly. A change—alarm in their body language. Awen jumped forward as Biri stumbled out, sluggish in the quarter g. They sucked in air, gasping. “Shit, shit.” They slammed a hand onto one of the tablets and the door stuttered as it closed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Stale air.” Biri coughed, then cleared their throat with a lighter affect. “Sorry. Scared me. It’s fine in here, right?”
Awen breathed in deeply. The air was hot and had an unpleasant smell of abandoned things, but it filled his chest the way the nitrogen-oxygen mix was supposed to. “Should be.” The fear passed. Awen began to think: What cascade of warning systems had to fail for this to be a mistake? Where had the oxygen gone? And then the fear was back, but deeper, a maw gaping beneath his feet.
“Damn.” Biri smiled, rueful. “I can’t believe they just let me open that door. Whatever happened to automated warning systems? What a dump. I should write the ombud. I guess I’ll go find an oxygen tank or something and go spelunking. It’ll be an adventure. You don’t have to come, I know you hate it here.”
“Biri.”
They caught something in his tone and stopped.
He met their soft-lidded eyes. “This is a bad sign, right?”
“For…?” But still, 30 years after the two of them had first met and a dozen years since they’d last worked in close tandem, Biri always knew what he was thinking. “Mistakes happen. We can’t extrapolate…” they said softly, chewing on their thumb.
“How can it be a mistake? Where did the oxygen go if no one’s been down here in months? Nothing’s using it.”
“I meant the mistake could be the lack of warning system. Honestly, it’s smart to clear out O2 from unused rooms. Thrifty even…” Biri trailed off. Then they sat down as heavily as the gravity allowed.
“You see,” Awen said, trying to ignore the roaring of his blood in his ears.
“I am wondering,” Biri began slowly, “why Tlin Maryv left. It occurs to me now, that if the Inquiry’s premier statistician and probabilist wants to shoot through space in a box the size of a classroom, it’s because she thinks her odds are better out there than in here.”
“And the odds she’ll ever find another ship out there, not to mention one accepting castaways…”
“I guess I thought she was having a midlife crisis,” Biri said. They jumped to their feet and began fiddling with the tablet by the door. “Last accessed 3 months ago.”
“Pre algae die-offs.”
“Fuck. This is crazy right? Some conspiracy shit. They said the virus only affected a few of the algae pods. They wouldn’t just… start shunting oxygen out of non-essential areas? Not without telling us something was really wrong. Imagine the work that would take.”
Awen’s thoughts whirled through the storm of his mind. He still felt like vomiting, and it wasn’t just the gravity-sickness. He ticked off his points on his fingers. One: “Someone is diverting oxygen, at least from this one storage room. We need more data.” Two: “Would it be crazier for them to tell us? Can you imagine the panic? 250,000 people, all aware that the air is running out. There’d be riots. It’d be like 2668 all over again.” Three: “But they did tell us, sort of. The die-offs are all over the news.”
“All over the news, but in the same tone as, I don’t know, when the governor sacked his cabinet, or when the cooling tanks flooded Fletcher Park. They didn’t say ‘this is an existential threat’! How dare they bury it with all the other nonsense?”
Awen imagined the suits in their meetings, trying to decide who needed to know and who deserved to be swaddled in comfortable ignorance. The image made him shudder. “You’re the biologist. How much of the ship’s oxygen needs were being met by the algae tanks that went under? How long will it take for the unaffected tanks to repopulate?”
“I’m a genomicist, not a fucking phycologist! Besides, the numbers are cooked. They have to be. One tank is nothing. There’s redundancy in the system. Unless the virus spread from tank to tank…” They trailed off. “Anh Weia’s been in meetings all week. She is a phycologist. I thought she’d been looking harried, but I never considered this.”
Should that comfort him? At least someone qualified was being consulted. But, for any civil servants to come down and beg for help from the eggheads, something was deeply wrong.
“We have to rule out that it’s a fluke,” Awen said. His head spun. “If it’s intentional, there will be logs. There’ll be other dead zones too.”
“And then what? We uncover the conspiracy and then what? We’ll know how fucked we are, but we won’t be able to do anything about it. Unless you’ve got your own shuttle plans.”
“The more we know, the more we can… I don’t know, think of something.”
“Write up a study on the certainty of our impending death, you mean?” Biri breathed in. Their tone changed. “I have to go find an oxygen tank. We have a statue to find.”
“You can’t be serious.”
They met his gaze. Their hands were shaking, but they clasped them together. “There is nothing else to do,” they said with unfamiliar intensity.
***
Awen waited down-elevator. That should have made the gravity sickness better, but of course his stomach continued to churn. While he waited, he undertook a comprehensive search through the data: promised oxygen output of the algae tanks, measured numbers (where available) from various points around the ship. Energy expenditures from vent-points near little-used sections consistent with breathable air being pumped out and carbon dioxide being pumped in. Data analysis was something to do, a path for his brain to follow that wasn’t panic.
Biri came back with the statue, both covered in dust. Oliver Rafael Duncan, better known as Ollie. It didn’t look like much, at least not tarnished with the fingerprints of hundreds of years of students. Just a metal-plated statue of a man sitting in a sleek chair. Duncan had planned to be the first president of the university, but when the Inquiry left Earth, he’d stayed behind to take care of his aging parent. His statue had been dedicated in his place. Awen wondered what he would think, if he’d ever known of the chaos that once every few years swirled up around his likeness.
“You found it,” Awen said.
Biri looked at him. Awen willed that connection the two of them had, the intuitive sense of each other from decades of friendship, to shut tight. “Not hard. There was a map,” they said, their voice fluty and unsure.
“Almost 2100. We should get to the library,” he said as gently as he could. And maybe that was enough, this uncharacteristic gentleness, because Biri knew, then, what he had found. “Let’s have a drink,” he said.
***
They said nothing as they sat in the hallway leading to the library main entrance, passing the liquor between them. After the third statue hunt had ended with engineering students hacking the library lock, a few faculty usually guarded the door—it was tradition. The university’s designers had underestimated students’ desperation to get places they shouldn’t be and had probably, like many of their forebears, pictured the Inquiry as some high-trust utopia without crime or locks. Lucky them.
The liquor felt like acid in this throat. The sound of the vents and the climate control system normally faded to a useless hum, no semantic content, but today they were all Awen could hear. How long did they all have left?
Ahead, a door opened and the sound of laughter tumbled through. A handful of undergrads came around the corner. “Oh, shit,” one of them said at the sight of Awen and Biri, and they retreated, still laughing. They were drunker than Awen. Their voices carried through the hallway in a mess of words: “Can’t we just ask? What’s the worst that could happen?” “Come on?” “No way, I have my rec letter to worry about.” “…suspended!”
In the end, a single undergrad came around the corner, walking stiffly like someone trying very hard to seem sober. Awen recognized them but he couldn’t remember their name. They had a ribbon tied around their wrist representing one of the dozen colleges competing in the hunt. “Hi, um, Professors. I don’t suppose you could, you know, just give us a few minutes with the door? We wouldn’t tell anyone.”
Biri, in all their sensibility, their voice only a little hoarse, said, “Nice try, Alder. But would that be fair?”
Awen couldn’t say anything at all. He was thinking this child is doomed. Not tonight, God willing, but soon, or soon enough, for a value of “soon” equaling “sometime in the next few years.” Before they would live their life. Or maybe they’d all get through this crisis, and it would be a different one that would take them out. Maybe they’d be overtaken by the fabled ships from Earth whose newer tech let them leapfrog the Inquiry. There was no way to know, and no way to do a goddamn thing about it.
The undergrad shifted from foot to foot. “It would be fair, because they could ask just the same. And we really wouldn’t tell.”
Biri swirled their glass. “What do you think?” they asked Awen softly.
What did Awen think? He thought there was something perverse in sitting here pretending the sky wasn’t falling. Didn’t this child, Alder, deserve to know? But didn’t they deserve to be happy in this infinitesimal moment before all the knowledge was out and things truly fell apart? Was that what everyone in the government—Maintenance or Leadership—had been thinking, when they’d made the decision to cover up the die-offs? Just let the sheep graze, keep them content.
“Sorry, not tonight. Good luck. But you’d better hurry,” Awen said.
The undergrad’s alcohol-flushed cheeks went even redder. “Yes, Professor. Sorry.” And they were gone.
Biri sent him a sideways glance. He didn’t have to explain, he never did with Biri, but he felt compelled to: “If we just gave it to them, they wouldn’t have the satisfaction of getting it. You understand, don’t you? They have to solve the small problems so the big ones feel possible.”
Biri nodded. “I hope…” But they both knew what Biri hoped, so Biri left the words unsaid.
Awen and Biri sat in silence as the lights cycled for nighttime, as from behind them in the library came sounds of clattering and hushed voices.
E. Carey Crowder lives in Seattle, Washington. Carey writes code for a living, speculative fiction for fun, and cryptic messages only on odd-numbered Tuesdays (mostly). This is Carey’s first published story.
Suvin couldn’t make the year’s gods, but she could wedge the clay that made them, slamming it into the table over and over again to get the air pockets out. Her village was a good one for god clay, sturdy and functional, and even without Auntie Deri, who had died in the winter, they had three old people and seven children, a solid number of people for making gods.
Two of the children were new to it this year, their gods clumsy and half-formed but powerful with their toddler enthusiasm. The other children varied from Zora, eleven and dreamy, to Jemmy, a stolid seven and absolutely intent on building as many animal gods as he could manage before the gods had to go in the kiln for Midsummer.
The elders were more considered in their approach to the divine, finding and filling in gaps in the children’s work, each according to their own life experience. Seeing that Jemmy managed a chicken god, a sheep god, and a spider god (likely to be friendly to spinners and weavers), Uncle Orn quietly filled in the rest of the village’s life with a god of the fields and a god of the forests. Auntie Larig made a god of childbirth and a god of death, both, so that the god of childbirth didn’t have to take over both functions. She had seen that once, when she was young, and was determined that it would never happen again.
Bei was too old this year, grown gawky and half-responsible. She skulked around the door of Suvin’s pottery, tossing criticism and complaints at those within, particularly her younger sibling Clar, who ignored her. Zora gazed after her for a moment, but then went back to making a god of rainbows. Suvin stepped out to speak with her.
“Aren’t you needed in the dairy?”
Bei shrugged, her whole body jerking.
Suvin tried again. “You’re not making it any easier on yourself watching. Go distract yourself; you’ll mind less if you’re thinking of something else.”
Bei scowled but stalked off, leaving Suvin feeling she’d made things worse rather than better for the girl.
Not everyone minded leaving the rituals of childhood behind them, nor showed their minding in the same way. Suvin herself had found that she missed the feel of the clay but not the spark of the divine, and by Midwinter of that first year she had found herself apprenticed to the previous potter. Neither of her brothers had thought a thing of it, shedding their childhood as thoughtlessly as an old jacket. But neither was Bei unprecedented. Auncle Phee had spent their adult years yearning for the creation of the Midsummer gods, and had settled into old age with a contented sigh.
Suvin wondered if Auncle Phee might be persuaded to have a quiet word with Bei when they were done making gods for the day, or whether that would feel to a prickly adolescent like piling on. In any case, Bei couldn’t lurk around the pottery all day distracting the god makers; that wasn’t good for anyone. Suvin went back in to find Auntie Larig a spare scribing tool.
By the time Suvin shooed them off to wash the clay from their hands (arms, noses, eyebrows), the ten of them had made two dozen gods, small and sure in their rows, ready to be fired. Suvin regarded them with satisfaction and no small amount of worry: this year’s gods would shape the days of the village, not just in their own year, but in their implications in the years beyond.
She could neither stop nor change them—her days of that were gone, or not yet come again. Every year the old gods had to be shattered, and the new made. Everyone knew from harsh experience that keeping old gods, or letting adults in their prime direct the new ones, led to cult and catastrophe. The old gods had been smashed to dust on the green to release their essence, and these were ready to dry, fire, and cool in time to catch the divine spark at Midsummer. Suvin arranged them carefully and slid the trays in, closing the door of the kiln.
She returned a few days later to take them out, ready to pull out gods, whole and cooled. Instead, there was a mass of clay shards and dust, nothing but rubble in the bottom of the kiln. The entire tray was ruined. Worst of all, Jemmy’s sheep god had shattered in the kiln like a hastily thrown pot, taking the god of childbirth, the god of hunting, and the god of the river with it. Not only was this catastrophic, it was unprecedented. Gods were not supposed to shatter. Gods shouldn’t have been able to shatter.
Something was badly wrong, and if they couldn’t hurry to make more, it was going to be a very hard year indeed. Gods of song or war were optional. A god of sheep was essential. Sheep were the lifeblood of the village. There were other keystones—the river, childbirth, hunting—but the sheep god was the worst of the lot to lose in a shepherding village. Suvin ran to find Jemmy, who was still at breakfast with his parents, Wurran and Arev.
“My sheep god?” he whispered.
“It’s not your fault,” said Wurran and Arev in unison.
“It really isn’t,” said Suvin, “but I was hoping you could see if you could make another one while we try to figure out what went wrong.” Jemmy was on his feet before she’d finished speaking, out the door like a flash, and Suvin had to hurry after him to get him clay that was properly prepared. She had just gotten him set up when she found Wurran had followed them both.
“The way I see it,” he said slowly, filling the door of the pottery with his broad shoulders, “the only reason making the gods would go wrong is if some part of the preparations weren’t done properly.”
Suvin cast around the pottery in a panic, trying to figure out how she had failed them. “I got the same clay we always get, but that’s not supposed to matter. I kept it moist and wedged it for them and placed it in the kiln myself; I just don’t see what I could have done to prepare it differently.”
“There’s the other half of the preparations,” said Wurran. He raised a significant eyebrow at her, but she was still not following. “The smashing of last year’s gods.”
Suvin’s stomach sank. “But— we all sang and watched—” But she knew whose name had come into her head at his words.
Wurran’s expression grew intense, as though he’d recognized the awful thought that crossed her mind. “How closely did you watch everyone? A lot of people had more than one god. There was all the smashing and the singing—it’s hard to keep track of everything. And you’re thinking you know whose god it is, aren’t you? Suvin, I’ve known you since we were young enough to make the gods ourselves.”
“I just have a theory. I’ll— I’ll tell you as soon as I have it confirmed. I don’t want to make trouble unless I have to.”
“We already have trouble, and we don’t have much time,” Wurran warned.
“I know. But— we have to get this right. Are you okay watching him here?” Suvin gestured at the workspace, at the ready clay, and Wurran nodded. Jemmy, intent on his second try at a sheep god, ignored them both, focused on the curls and rounds that whispered “fleece” into his heart.
Suvin walked more slowly than she should to the house where Bei lived with her parents, aunt, and sibling. An unsmashed god—oh, how she wanted to be wrong. But when she saw Bei sitting outside on a bench, shelling peas, she knew from the girl’s sullen startle that she was right.
“You know why I’m here, don’t you,” she said, sitting on the other side of the pea basket so she could help shell while she talked.
Bei glared at her.
“It’s already going wrong. The sheep god shattered in the kiln because the power isn’t out of all of last year’s gods yet.” She snuck a glance at Bei’s face. The girl was shaken, ashen. That was a good sign: it had not been deliberate sabotage of the other gods. But Suvin knew she couldn’t stop there, as upset as they both were–and as much as Suvin would have liked to just get back to her silent, malleable clay. “Who knows how much worse it will get from here. You have to give it up, Bei. You have to smash the god. I haven’t told anyone it’s you, you can just— do it now, it’s not too late.”
Bei’s eyes filled with defiant tears. “It’s my last one, my last god until I’m old or maybe ever, not everybody lives to be old!”
Suvin shook her head in disbelief. “We all have a last god; that’s just the way of things. You don’t get to keep it. It sucks power from the new gods, tries to form a cult.”
“Mine wouldn’t.”
“They all do.”
Bei leapt to her feet, upsetting the pea basket. “You don’t know my god of beauty! You haven’t been paying attention to it all year—nobody has but me, you all thought it was stupid! Well, I’m not giving it up, and you can’t make me!” She dashed down the path into the bog before Suvin was halfway off the bench.
Suvin sank back, numb. She had expected Bei to be concerned for the village at large, contrite. Biddable. She had expected Bei to behave like a chastened child. Or maybe a thoughtful adult. This cusp stage had caught her completely off-guard. She made her way back to the pottery in a daze. Jemmy was still hard at work. Wurran raised an eyebrow at her.
“It’s Bei,” she managed. “She… didn’t want to stop making gods. Feels like no one understands her, from the sounds of it. Becoming an adult is difficult, but—”
“But no one else threatens our safety because of it. Bei can’t be permitted to either. We’ll have to track her down.”
Suvin blinked up at Wurran. He was so gentle with Jemmy, she had not expected this reaction. “She’s run into the bog.”
“I’ll go drag her out by her hair, she’s small enough,” said Wurran grimly.
Suvin shook her head. “Would you do that to me?”
“I couldn’t, you’re scrappy.”
“But if you could.”
Wurran thought about it. “No, I’d talk to you first.”
“We have to talk to her first. We’re telling her she’s an adult, we have to treat her like an adult. We can’t just take away all the best parts of being a child without anything in recompense.”
“You’ve earned being talked to first. You behave like a reasonable person.”
“I think sometimes we have to be the first ones to be reasonable.”
Wurran didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a counterargument. The problem, Suvin thought, was that he was the wrong person to do the talking, and she certainly was. In Bei’s mind, she was the cruel person who had chased Bei out of the pottery and denigrated her god of beauty. They would have to find someone else. Someone Bei didn’t find threatening. Someone she loved.
Someone who understood how hard it could be to let go of making the gods.
Auncle Phee was upset to hear the news of the sheep god, and then bewildered by Suvin’s request. “But what can I do for little Bei?”
“Not so little any more. She’s angry with me. I hoped you could talk sense to her. You… reacted like this, but not really.”
They laughed wearily. “I did run off to the bog and weep. I just skipped straight to that part, I suppose. Oh, there was a lot of weeping down there when I was young. I was a little waterfall, you wouldn’t believe.”
Suvin smiled sadly. “We all… grow in our own way. I guess I hoped you might try to speak to her. I could ask her parents, but I think she’s at an age—”
“No, no, not her parents,” said Auncle Phee hastily. “All right, I’ll come. Let me get another shawl and a walking stick.”
The two of them walked together, squelching along companionably on the damp soil. There was neither sight nor sound of Bei until they got nearer the river. Then a thread of her hem showed them where to turn. They found her sitting in the mouth of one of the river caves, throwing rocks angrily into the river.
“Go away!” she shouted.
“We’re just here to talk!” Suvin shouted back. “You don’t even have to talk to me; just talk to Auncle Phee.”
No response. Phee edged closer, though Suvin kept at their heels to provide assistance if necessary. “I know this is hard, Bei,” Auncle Phee started, “but you have to be brave.”
“I don’t! I don’t have to be brave. I can just keep my god with me and it can handle being brave!”
“She’s got us there,” Auncle Phee muttered out of the corner of their mouth.
“But that’s a really bad idea for the rest of us,” said Suvin, equally quietly.
“It is. Bei, that’s a really bad idea for everyone else,” Phee said more audibly. “Like your Dad, or like Clar. I know they must annoy you sometimes—my brother annoyed me—but that doesn’t mean you want them to have to struggle along without any gods.”
“They could share mine!”
“She’s got all the answers,” Auncle Phee whispered.
Suvin sucked breath in through her nose, wishing there were still gods she could ask for patience—especially as that did not look like a blessing that the god of beauty, still clutched in Bei’s pocket, provided. Auncle Phee crept closer. Suvin followed.
“Seeing your god smashed is terrible,” Auncle Phee tried. “Don’t I know it. The whole thing was terrible. It’s the kind of terrible that’s like getting over an ague, though, you just have to grit your teeth and endure it. No one’s come up with another way.”
“Why don’t you, then.”
Auncle Phee wheezed out a laugh. “We’re not that good yet. Maybe that’ll be on you to figure out; maybe that will be your adult work. To quest for some better way, so that people can grow up without pain. I don’t know of one, but maybe you will. But first you have to get there. And a village that depends on one god… isn’t going to raise you or Clar or Jemmy or any of the others to be strong adults who can go on quests. Too many bad harvests and passing fevers for that.”
There was quiet. Suvin wondered if Bei had thought about how little help her god of beauty would be in the face of the barley harvest failing, or spotted fever coming down the river in the wet season. Instead Bei said, “What if you made me another one? A god of beauty? So that mine could just… come back. We have a sheep god every year. If you’d just make me another god of beauty…”
“I can’t, little one,” said Auncle Phee.
“Why does no one understand how important beautiful things are?” Bei cried, and Suvin was moved despite her annoyance. “There are so many, and everyone ignores it! They just go on like lumps, turn the cheeses, milk the sheep, nobody says, oh, look, Bei, look how glorious the lupines are in bloom, look at how perfect this apple is. No one. It’s just me.”
“I don’t mean that I won’t make your god for you, child. I mean that I can’t.”
Bei finally looked at them, sullen but paying attention for the first time.
“My god of beauty wouldn’t be yours. It couldn’t. We don’t find the same things beautiful; we aren’t excited by the same beauty. It wouldn’t catch the same spark. Your god was yours—nobody could have made it for you. I could promise to make you one, but I can’t lie to you and tell you it’ll be yours.”
Suvin thought that Auncle Phee most certainly could have lied. But Bei was listening, at least. Thinking. Suvin had brought Auncle for a reason; it was theirs to try. Even if Suvin hated to see an easy solution rejected out of hand.
“So what do I do?”
Suvin wanted to answer: you just go on. You just do. There will be things in life that hurt, things that you grieve for with your whole self, and you… go on, you turn the cheese, you milk the sheep, you admire the field of lupines, you ache, but you go on. But that was an answer Bei might not be ready to hear. Even in the darkest hours, adults were supposed to be there to help children persevere, to show the way through to light again.
“What if Auncle makes you a different god?” she said aloud.
Both of them jumped. They’d forgotten she was there. “What other god did you have in mind?” said Auncle Phee. “I can’t do everything. I can’t do most things; ask Jemmy what use I’d be at a god of cats or beetles.”
“But the abstract ones, you’re good at those. Something else that could help Bei with the journey she’s on now.” Suvin didn’t toss out suggestions. Auncle Phee, of all people, didn’t make gods to order. If they were to accomplish this, they’d need to do it their own way. Phee’s wrinkled face creased further as they thought it over.
“Two gods,” said Auncle Phee finally. “If I have the time—and I will try very hard to have the time. A god of roads, for this new road you’re on. And a god of childhood. For you to say goodbye to. You’ll have a year to pray to it, be with it, let it bless your ways. A lot can happen in a year. And then we’ll see, after.”
Bei burst into tears, and Suvin was afraid they’d failed beyond redemption. Wurran wasn’t right, couldn’t be right, about forcing the god away from her. Yet if she wouldn’t give in of her own free will, what else was there to do?
But she had misinterpreted the girl’s reaction. Bei stepped out of the cave. Suvin could see her shoulders shaking even from her distance, but Bei held out the little clay figure and deliberately threw it to the ground.
It didn’t shatter on impact. Bei took a hiccupping deep breath, and then Auncle Phee was with her, one arm around her as they handed her the hammer from Suvin’s belt and let her strike the first cracking blow. A rosy light flew out of the god with that blow, but Bei continued, crying and smashing, until it was dust on the stones of the cave. Only then did Auncle Phee stop her.
“Well done,” said Auncle Phee, and Suvin said, “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you had to.”
Bei was crying too hard to answer.
“I’ll get started on those gods right away. There’s still time, isn’t there, Suvin?”
“Of course there’s time,” said Suvin firmly. “Auncle will make you a beautiful god of childhood, light and new, and a wonderful god of roads, strong and broad. And you’ll dance with the other adults at the pole, you’ll take hands and dance. You won’t be alone.”
Bei looked up miserably. “I don’t believe that yet. But I’ll try.”
Author’s Note: As often happens with my short stories, I was messing with two ideas that collided. One is that my godchildren are growing up. I am generally pro-growing-up! In favor of adulthood! But it is not at all easy sometimes, in ways that those of us who have already gone through it tend to minimize. The other is that I wanted a fantasy story whose gods are tangibly not just parts of an Earth pantheon in funny hats. “Oh, I’m Bodin, and this is my son Bthor”: no. So I started to think about more seasonal, cyclical ideas of the divine, and this came out.
Marissa Lingen writes fantasy, science fiction, poetry, and essays. She lives in the Minnesota River Valley near its confluence with the Mississippi and is cheerfully obsessed with its geology and limnology. She is also inordinately fond of trees, tisanes, dark chocolate, and Moomins.
We have been publishing the annual Long List Anthology since 2015. Last year at this time we hadn’t been able to run the Long List Anthology yet because the nomination statistics had not been published yet. This was extremely unusual since WorldCon 2023 had been in October and they usually publish the stats before they end. When they finally published the statistics in January 2024 there were various issues with the statistics that we didn’t feel it would be possible to produce an anthology from the list at that time.
In last year’s eligibility and retrospective we said this might mean that 2024 is another two-anthology year, so that turned out to not be true. And then, although WorldCon was back in its usual month of September, we are working on a new edition but decided to give ourselves more breathing room and fundraise and publish it in early 2025. So, instead of two Long List Anthology volumes in 2024, there have been zero, with the second one planned for early 2025. More information soono!
In 2023, we published 24 original stories in Diabolical Plots.
This year we renamed some of our staff positions to better reflect the nature of the work. I had always called myself “Editor” but now I am officially “Editor-In-Chief. And what we had previously called “Assistant Editor” we now call “Editor”. In addition, we have also started adding editor credit to all the stories for the particular editor(s) who worked with the author on the individual story.
This year we bid farewell to editor Kel Coleman, as well as Chelle Parker, and we wish them both the best! We also welcomed new editor Amanda Helms to join Ziv Wities and Hal Y. Zhang on the Editor team.
Diabolical Plots opened for general submissions in July. We read more than 1300 submissions and accepted 23 stories from the window. We updated some practices, including adding an optional “Content Note” box to the submission form as well as a suggested list of content notes that we would like to see when they apply if possible. We also added a formal “Rewrite Request” process, something which we normally just handled outside of the system in previous years.
It is never not a busy year in my personal life, but (crossing fingers) we are on the verge of having finished a calendar year without one of our dogs passing away, after losing one both of the prior years. Our dog Mabel had a crappy diagnosis this year, but so far she’s been doing well with treatment.
The rest of this post is award eligibility, suggesting categories for major awards, as well as a full link of stories with snippets.
Magazine/Anthology/Editor/Publisher
Diabolical Plots is eligible in the Hugo Best Semiprozine category or the Locus Magazine category with our team of First Readers as well as our Editors.
David Steffen is eligible as Editor-In-Chief of Diabolical Plots. Editors within this year were Ziv Wities, Kel Coleman, Hal Y. Zhang, Chelle Parker, and Amanda Helms. I’m not really sure how to interpret the eligibility rules for editor for Hugo for an online publication–supposed to edit four issues, we count the monthly pair as an issue, does it only count if the same editor edits both stories? Hugos allow multiple editors in a nomination, as is shown by editors of Uncanny for instance, but I’ve only ever seen two editors nominated that way, I don’t know how it works for a larger team, etc.
Diabolical Plots, LLC is eligible for Locus award for Publisher.
Is cross-stitch eligible for anything? Maybe fan art? LOL probably not. But check out this giant cross-stitch that took me almost two years to finish anyway!
The surface of the iceberg has long had its taste of bitter cuisine: shimmering snow, wriggling bacterial filament, microplastic granules from the stolen boat you steered across the choppy Arctic waves. But this is new: the woody whisper of your matrilineal family map. The iceberg leeches the warmth from the paper, like sucking air through teeth, trying to latch on— but you bend, shake the map, and tuck it back into your pocket.
When they woke it was in what little pocket warmth they’d accumulated between their bodies in the night, clinging together in a sleeping bag as if without the other they would forget how to breathe, or why. When Nash cracked his eyes open to take in this reality it was to Vicky watching him, her face as beautiful as everything behind it, a moment of naked love in which they both wished that they could remain lying here like this, frozen in stasis. Neither needed to say it.
But time moved on. Inexorable, mechanical as a wave in the ocean, as the dissolve of light into dark. They knew it was time to go when Vicky mumbled that he needed to brush his teeth, and Nash said that she’d had too much to drink last night.
Hey, kid. Ol’ Buddy here, your favourite underground, pamphlet-writing canuck. I hope, whoever and wherever you are, you’re well. Keep the generator full, the firewood chopped, and the contraband hidden.
Yeah, I said the next guide was going to be about rainwater collecting, but this topic is pretty fucking overdue for a pamphlet. File a complaint, if that bothers you. (Too bad this is real paper, asshole! No comment section!)
Lem had existed for all of ten nanoseconds (give or take) when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain pulsing away in the otherwise nothingness of space. She consisted of a conglomeration of particles that had randomly bounced off one another until they spontaneously formed into a structurally-sound and fully functional human brain. Lem came complete with a full inventory of false memories detailing a richly lived life back on a place called Earth. Entities like herself were absurd. That was to say highly improbable, statistically speaking, but no more so than the evolution of intelligent, organic life in the grand scheme of things. Given the unfathomable expanse of all of time and all of space, it was conceivable for a nice Boltzmann brain like Lem to randomly form then quickly dissipate innumerable times at various spots across the cosmos, the general tendency towards thermal equilibrium notwithstanding.
Usually Friend gives me three food pouches after sportsgames, but today only one. He spits it out of his chest slot, and I kick off the bulkhead to snatch it before it gets caught in that jumble of wires over by the vents. When I grab the nearest handhold and swivel in the air for the next one to come, Friend just floats there with his slot closed and his metal arms at his sides.
“Did I do wrong parameters?” I ask.
“Naw, Graciela,” says Friend. “You were grumper to the leez! You sealed your suit with no mistakes, and you dodged all the obstacles on the course. Nineteenth time in a row!”
At this age, on the planet of Orvalho, Alberto is conjoined with the ship called The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds. They’re engulfed in the Mezelões’ unifying mix, a tank where a swirling brackish secretion flows through their pores and recesses, nanoscopic spidery bots tying their espírito together—parts and limbs, yottabytes and nucleotides, ship and captain, physically separated, spiritually united.
1. Raid the army surplus warehouse, NASA’s scrapyard, and Aunt Diabolica’s volcano lair for parts. On the way home, swing by CatCo to buy more Fancy Feast for Mr. Wibbles.
Miracle Fresh is a soft drink produced by Spirits & Co. since 2027. The original pitch described a holy club soda blessed with droplets of blood from our devoted Messiah, something the average person could drink on the go, après-exercising, or even at [insert holy building of choice] without requiring long tiresome religious proceedings. This idea was abandoned shortly after the company realized a soft drink would appeal to a greater audience, and after considering the lawsuit filed by the parental association Guardians of our Holy Youth (GHY), who worried the club soda would be used as a component of alcoholic mixed drinks. Associating our devoted Messiah with sugar and adding a clear appeal to children did not seem to faze any of the naysayers.
My name is Yasuko Nagamine and I work for the employment bureau. There’s a monster destroying the city. It used to be the mascot for the organ rental service, Sensation. I guess it still is but I don’t think it’s doing much for their bottom line anymore.
[Guide] Welcome to this interactive guide! I understand from your About Me profile that you have an issue with a brain that needs killing. I’m here to help!
[graciegirl2006!?] I can’t believe I found this.
[Guide] Actually, we are the top search engine result for the keywords in your query!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Mama’s bones scream as the writhing mass of beetles cleans her skeleton. My fingers bury themselves in my ears against my will, trying to block the shrieking no one else can hear and the squish of macerated flesh they can. I don’t know which one’s worse.
Captain Ruby Tauda of the whale-ship Balentora strapped down a crate of medicine and hurried across the star-whale’s mouth. She and her crew had always used the mouth as a cargo bay, but this wasn’t their usual cargo. They weren’t thieves.
I’m not supposed to talk to the locals, but that’s not a problem because there don’t seem to be any. Not as far as the eye can see. Not in the endless blue I can’t look away from. Not along the windswept bluffs high above that crashing, ever-changing vastness that makes me feel smaller than I’ve ever felt. And yet bigger. More alone. And less.
Herewith I present to Your Holiness Clement IV the proceedings regarding the phenomenon at Santa Sabina.
On the 25th day of the month of March in this year of our Lord 1265, I was ordered by the Most Holy Father to the Studium Conventuale di Santa Sabina all’Aventino to evaluate the existence, or lack thereof, of a soul housed within a Wooden Likeness of a Man, the Likeness having been constructed by Father Antonio di Cassino, a friar serving in that place.
The first time Margie raised the dead, it was to prove she didn’t eat her dog. As Harold hadn’t been walked around the neighbourhood recently, her classmate Brenda assumed Margie’s family devoured their dog and caught SARS.
Content note (click for details)Content note: anti-Asian racism and misogyny, murder, body horror, gore, pet death.
The first time Margie raised the dead, it was to prove she didn’t eat her dog. As Harold hadn’t been walked around the neighbourhood recently, her classmate Brenda assumed Margie’s family devoured their dog and caught SARS.
Harold was a beloved member of the Lungs. That grey fluffy Pomeranian guarded Margie since she was born. He spent his final months lying limp on his beanie bed, yet he growled and his fur stood on end whenever the doorbell rang.
Margie arose before dawn to bring Harold back. She squeezed between the backyard’s fence and shed to reach his resting place. She flung fistfuls of dirt off the soaked shoebox. Worms and maggots crawled up her wrists at the sudden disturbance; she brushed them off with her hands.
Poh Poh taught her to raise the dead; with brushes dipped in chicken’s blood, they wrote spells on paper, copying from old instruction manuals, and practiced on mangled squirrels and sparrows in the backyard. Those animals stood, brown wings and furry black arms raised, and hopped towards a small ditch as Poh Poh knelt and rang a bell. Their powers were used for undertaking. Why not do other things before the dead were laid to rest?
Margie pulled a yellow talisman from her waistband and punched it through the box. Gas, grit, and flies burst from her force. The cardboard coffin and surrounding dirt trembled and collapsed inward. A high-pitched yelp came from the grave.
Harold poked his head out of the ground. He licked his pointed nose. His beady black eyes widened staring up at her. He yipped a greeting and wiggled his whole form to shake the insects off and out of him.
“Morning, Harold.” She pulled him by the paws to get him to stand on all fours. Harold wagged his short tail with vigour and smiled with his tongue out. He was so excited to see her and have his strength back! “Wanna walk?”
Harold limped towards her; the surgery he had on his hip last year never fully healed.
Margie retrieved the black leash from her pocket and attached it to his collar. When her parents buried him, they left his collar around his neck because he was irreplaceable.
Margie led them out the backyard. Harold hopped once, twice, then kept to it to follow by her side. The talisman on his back flapped up and down with each bounce. No matter how stiff, goeng-si could always jump.
Based on the dark sky and bright streetlights, it was around six a.m. Brenda’s dad jogged wearing a Walkman, fanny pack, and tracksuit with orange neon stripes. If Margie found him and showed him her dog, he could tell his daughter nobody devoured Harold and he died of old age.
Cedarvale Park’s entrance opened with a misty paved path flanked by tall trees. Leaves crunched under Margie’s slippers. Harold panted. Drool dripped out his mouth and onto the sidewalk.
“Are you tired?” She couldn’t wait for Harold to adjust to his new state; her family wouldn’t understand her motives. They ran a funeral home to send the dead away, not bring them back. Or, at least, they didn’t anymore. They ended the whole leading-the-dead business generations ago.
Her parents and older sister, Evelyn, told her it was disrespectful to revive the dead. How did they know? They never asked goeng-si what they thought. In movies, they usually went on rampages until they were subdued by someone. Margie wanted to sit one down and ask why they came back with bloodthirst.
“Margie, stop!” Evelyn pounded towards Margie in her pajamas.
Harold’s tail wagged and he yipped in greeting.
Margie was going to get an earful from Evelyn. Margie snatched Harold into her arms and charged into the park, dashing up a slope with tall grass. Evelyn, chasing her sister, tripped and slipped into the dirt. Margie reached the top. A man with a racket in the nearby tennis court turned to her. Harold bared his fangs and snarled at the stranger.
“What’s wrong with your dog?”
Nothing’s wrong with him. Margie ran around fencing and hid behind a tree, leaning against the trunk and panting. She’d never find Brenda’s dad now. She had to try one last thing. She held Harold up, so their dark eyes stared straight into the other’s.
“Find Brenda’s Baba!” She had the image of a middle-aged skinny jogger in her mind and burned her gaze into Harold.
He stared at her in concentration. She was trying to teach him a trick and he couldn’t decipher the action he had to perform to get a treat.
Evelyn yanked Margie by her shirt collar. Harold dropped to the ground. Margie kicked and shrieked as her sister gripped her by the waist, but she wouldn’t let go.
“Do you know how much trouble you’re in?”
***
Harold barked and barked at the sisters. They were a pack; infighting like this was never allowed! Sometimes, the two of them argued, but it never got this physical.
Margie’s mouth released a long high-pitched cry. Tears streaked her face. She wailed like that when she was a puppy, spending her days sleeping and feeding. One day, she’d be as big as the other humans because he protected her. Why he had been buried in a box in the backyard was a mystery, but he could bark and follow Margie again.
Margie collapsed onto the ground and he ran up to her. Evelyn yanked the paper off his back and the world went black.
***
The second time Margie raised the dead, it was to extend a long life that should’ve gone longer.
Poh Poh chose to die at home. She didn’t want to be tended to by strangers in a hospice and have instruments run on her. She lay on her wide bed with several layers of blankets. Her cheeks had grown sallow and the outlines of her neck and collarbone creased her skin as she lost weight. A black beanie covered her head as her white hair was styled short.
Mama raised a spoon of congee to Poh Poh’s lips. “Eat.”
Poh Poh parted her lips, took a small sip, and turned her face away. Margie stayed by her grandma’s side, scribbling in a notebook, as relatives entered and left checking in on Poh Poh.
In the afternoon, her chest went still. With her eyes closed and face laxed, she appeared to be sleeping. Once an aunt noticed Poh Poh wasn’t breathing, she called for everyone to gather in the bedroom. Among the crowd, several sniffled or covered their teary eyes. Murmurs about what to do next circulated through the room. Margie knelt in the corner and put her hands over her ears.
Harold’s body rotted behind the shed years ago and was unretrievable, but Margie wouldn’t let Poh Poh leave, not until she was ready. They were supposed to grow bitter melons together in the backyard, as they did every summer. The seeds in the aluminum dishes they set on a windowsill had germinated with tiny white roots sprouting. The crops’ yellow flowers sometimes moved in the direction of the sun. Their leaves shriveled as the nights grew colder. Who was going to look after them with Margie?
Life wasn’t fair. Death was unfair. Why just stay here and accept death? Who was Margie, other than someone who could redefine what being alive meant?
Margie dashed to her bedroom and rummaged through her drawer. Poh Poh was illiterate, but she taught Margie how to write and copy spells. If she had regrets or things left unsaid in this life, Margie would give her one last chance before moving on.
“Get out of the way!” Margie waved the talisman above her and charged into Poh Poh’s room.
“Ah-Margie, stop!” Mama grabbed her daughter’s arm, but Margie jerked away as her mother’s nails left long pale scratches along her skin. She slapped the talisman on her grandma’s forehead. Poh Poh’s eyes popped open and she sprang sitting up.
A cousin screamed at the back. How could Margie use her powers on their matriarch?
“Poh Poh!” Margie grabbed her grandma by the sleeve and shook her. “Say something!”
She passed away ten minutes ago. If she needed to speak, she could do it now, before it was too late. Relatives yanked Margie back. She cried out and stretched her hands out to Poh Poh. She couldn’t be the only one who wanted Poh Poh to stay with them. Who didn’t want their grandma to live forever?
***
Poh Poh observed wrinkles and spots on her adult children and pimples and braces on her grandchildren; her sight had never been better in years. Everyone yelled at each other in the room. All their words meant nothing, travelling jumbled in a circle.
The yellow talisman fluttered up and down Poh Poh’s face. Ah-Margie did that. She was brought back to life minutes after death. Was it worth it? It had been generations since their powers were needed to lead the dead home. She wanted to be buried here, in Canada, beside her husband; she had no intention of returning to her birth village.
Ah-Margie’s eyes were round and focused on Poh Poh even as she was pressed down on the floor by relatives. Poh Poh’s false teeth gleamed between her lips as she smiled. Her laugh was dry and hoarse as her chest expanded with air. She was right to pass on her knowledge of raising the dead. Ah-Margie could, would grow and guide the dead to a dignified final journey. That was all Poh Poh wanted.
She yanked the talisman off, lay back, and resumed being dead.
***
The third time Margie raised the dead, she didn’t have any other choice.
No matter the trauma, body bags were supposed to be still. The zipped white pouch was motionless on the table, yet something beat within Winona’s body.
Margie rubbed her blurry eyes. The back of her head buzzed. Was she imagining things? She had stayed late at the funeral home browsing online.
When Winona was found dead, stabbed outside Spadina Station, a media circus broke out. Editorials discussed how this was related to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or how it wasn’t. Authorities investigated it as a random incident; the killer was unknown, so there was no evidence she was targeted because of her race or gender.
On social media, people declared this sort of thing didn’t happen in Canada. Others posted proof to the contrary: the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Vancouver anti-Asian riots, internment camps, the head tax and Chinese Exclusion Act, border controls, carding, the bamboo ceiling—that was their Canada. What did people do when faced with this? What could someone do?
Winona was named after the area her family immigrated to in Toronto. Margie lived nearby, walked through it, and went to school there. They might have encountered each other in a convenience store selecting candy, browsing through an aisle of books in a library, or waiting at a bus stop.
The body bag expanded and deflated; Winona breathed.
Margie’s hand twitched. This corpse needed to be controlled before it arose and sought vengeance. Anger was the fluid that brought her back to life. Margie was supposed to quell goeng-si from rampaging by placing a talisman on their forehead and leading them to their resting place.
When Margie brought the dead back, she was supposed to guide them towards peace. She had done things backwards with Harold and Poh Poh; they had no reason to come back as they lived long, fulfilled lives and were cared for at death. Winona had none of that. She wouldn’t leave for the afterlife until she got revenge. All Margie needed was a talisman written with chicken blood to give Winona peace. What was the point of having powers if you didn’t use them to fight for a good cause?
The body bag trembled and drummed against the table. Winona extended her limbs and clawed and kicked the pouch like a creature emerging from a womb. Margie unzipped it.
***
Winona had to escape. In the dark, she swiped and punched. Her heels banged the solid surface behind her as the world shook. She tore at her back and dug nails into her wounds. He stabbed her there so many times, when would he stop?
White light beamed on her. Was this a trick of her assailant? Winona extended her fangs and claws to counter whatever came at her.
Her forehead was slapped and vision obscured in white and black by a strip of paper. Her body froze. The world was now dark blue. A small stream flowed over mud and stone. On each side of the water were trees with yellow and orange leaves. Cedarvale Park: she had jogged through there, years ago. Why was she seeing this?
“You’re safe in my family’s morgue,” a woman spoke.
What was she doing here? She was fending herself off from an attacker after leaving Spadina Station. She wanted to grab a book from Robarts Library; classes were finally happening on campus again. The students in her tutorial expected to discuss the professor’s assigned readings. She had to grade papers, edit her thesis, and grab groceries for herself and her fiancé. She couldn’t be dead.
Why was this happening to her? Why did she live to learn about her own death? Winona uttered a cry; something hoarse and hollow emerged from her mouth. Had her body decomposed so far that she was without speech?
A hand stroked her hair. “I’m here to help.”
What could this stranger do for her? She couldn’t return to what her life was.
“Winona.” The woman clasped her hands, claws, and flesh. “They haven’t found your killer, but you can. You’re both connected, whether you like it or not.”
Winona gripped the hands that were offered to her. Her pointy nails dug into the other’s skin. Warm droplets of blood rolled down her wrists. If Winona did nothing, he’d get away with murder.
“I’m from the same place as you, Winona. Men honked at you from cars since you were a teen too, right? You’ve been followed and asked where you’re from. No, where’re you really from?”
It wasn’t just strangers. Her classmates, acquaintances, and exes grabbed her, insulted her, hit her. She was punished for just existing. She always kept her head down and fled in silence. What else could she do? She was helpless, until she died.
“You’ve thought about getting back at all those assholes, haven’t you? We all have.”
Her killer was like all the others who wronged her. He’d continue hurting and targeting others if she didn’t stop him. Winona ground her fangs. Her sharp teeth could crunch down on her killer’s bones and reduce them to bits. She’d render him small for her consumption by tearing up his flesh with her bare hands. She defied heaven and hell to return here; she was the strongest being alive.
She’d thoroughly disrespect him. Her feet could stomp and crush all his organs. She’d splatter blood over his home’s walls and ceiling with the force of her fists. He’d never find closure to his violent end.
“You have a few hours before you have to come back here.” The woman let go of Winona.
***
As the blue-haired VTuber hit the high note at the end of her song, clapping hand emojis flooded the chat. Margie watched the singing streamer on her phone as she waited in the kitchen. She sent several messages with heart icons.
Margie grabbed a dampened cloth and lifted her wok’s lid. Steam puffed up in a cloud, as did the aroma of shrimp, eggs, and chives. The stirred eggs in the tin dish solidified into yellow and white, with a bubbly surface spotted with chopped green onions and mini shrimp. Their tiny black eyes dotted the surface. This was how Poh Poh made it. Margie set it on a coaster and cut it apart in quarters. As she lifted a slice up, the ends of glass noodles hung out.
Her apartment door creaked open. The footsteps were heavy with every stomp and hop.
“Oh, you’re here? Are you hungry?” Margie set up two bowls on her table with steamed eggs and rice. Margie held a spoon; if Winona needed to be fed, she’d help.
The goeng-si turned the corner into view. Winona kept a hand on the wall to support herself. Her palm left streaks of blood on the white wall. Her head tilted right, along with the talisman on her forehead. Margie’d scrub up the blood soon.
Winona stared at Margie. The rank pungent smell of human flesh and blood wafted throughout the kitchen as she exhaled; it was stronger than when corpses were drained of blood for embalming. Winona’s clothes were soaked red. They dripped a dark trail on the floor. She had eaten well.
Margie doubled the portions for nothing. She’d stretch her rice and eggs for lunch and dinner, maybe save some for tomorrow.
“Sit down, at least.” Winona was going to continue hopping as she stiffened and returned to death. Margie retrieved a dark hoodie from her bedroom. She stood by a seated Winona and held the garment up.
“Wear this and we can go back to the funeral home.” Did Winona understand the implications? Her family wanted an open casket viewing. Her face needed to be patched up with wax, clay, and makeup to hide the cuts and bruises.
Winona turned her head up to Margie. Her glassy eyes were spotted red, brown, and black.
“You killed him, right?” Margie said. “Is there anything else you need to do?”
Her head bobbed back, then forward as a nod to her first question, then her head swayed left and right for no. The talisman followed her movements. Margie couldn’t peer into the goeng-si’s mind. If she could, she would’ve asked Harold if he appreciated her placing blankets on him as he slept on his beanie bed and questioned Poh Poh about her adventures subduing the undead.
Margie covered Winona’s head and arms with the hoodie. From a distance, the blood was unnoticeable. The bandages around Margie’s hands pressed against the other person.
In the morgue, the goeng-si’s nails dug deep into Margie’s skin. One way to become a goeng-si was through infection. Tomorrow, she’d unwrap her bandages. If the punctures were coloured anything like a corpse’s, she’d consult the old manuals for antidotes to remove her poison; if that didn’t work, Evelyn would have to subdue her by slapping a talisman on Margie. As tempted as Margie was to prepare comebacks for her sister’s scolding, she had to deal with Winona first.
“Can you run for thirty minutes? That’s all we need.” If Winona jumped from roof to roof as Margie jogged on the sidewalk, they could travel without raising suspicion.
“Y-s….” Winona’s legs trembled as she stood. Margie held Winona by the arm to help her stand.
Her parents would have arrived at the funeral home about now and they’d have to let her in. They sensed when corpses arose. This time, they were too far away to control her. What could they do? Turn her in to authorities and expose their powers? They were forced into silence now. In the end, Margery Lung was unstoppable.
Margie patted Winona’s shoulder as she headed to the front door. According to Poh Poh, their ancestors, for a fee, may have marched the dead from cities back to their birth villages at night by using talismans. They rattled bells to warn people to stay away from them.
The story’s setting is close to home; I live, work, and play near the Oakwood Village area in Toronto, where Winona Drive is. While Canada likes to prop itself up as a welcoming and multicultural place, it is not without its flaws. I wanted to highlight the historical, cyclical, and systemic violence Asian people, especially Asian women, are subjected to. Using the goeng-si, I wanted a victim of such violence to get revenge.
Goeng-si (also called jiāngshī) are hopping vampires or zombie-like creatures from Chinese folklore. They’re usually depicted wearing Qing dynasty official outfits with talismans clinging to their foreheads. A human may turn into one due to things such as getting attacked and infected by a goeng-si, a bad death (i.e. murder, suicide), or a Taoist priest needing to transport the deceased. Goeng-si genre films experienced breakthrough success in the 1980s with franchises like Mr. Vampire, a Cantonese language series produced in Hong Kong.
Lisa Cai is from Toronto, Canada. She has been published in The Dark, Polar Borealis Magazine, and others. When not reading or writing, she is probably wrangling with IT at a university, watching anime, taking a long walk, or solving crimes in Among Us. Her socials are listed athttps://linktr.ee/lisacai.
