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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.
Let it be understood, first of all, that no creature can create from nothing. The power of that which produces something from nothing is infinite, and no creature has an infinite power, any more than it has an infinite being. Thus, though Father Antonio may have been able to create a Wooden Likeness of a Man, just as a saw in cutting wood produces the form of a bench, creation of the soul, which is of an immaterial substance, is the act of God alone. Thus it was clear to me even before my arrival at Santa Sabina that the Wooden Likeness could not possess a soul.
The circumstances by which the Likeness was made are as follows: It being nine years ago, in the year of our Lord 1256, Father Antonio constructed the Likeness of cypress wood, this being the wood upon which our Savior was crucified, and he hammered for him a face-plate of beaten gold. A box strung with catgut was placed into the Likeness’s throat, and an animal’s bladder placed in its chest, to allow for the movement of air. By pumping the bladder and maneuvering the Likeness’s jaw by means of a pump-and-pulley, Father Antonio produced the effect of speech within the Likeness.
For nine years, Father Antonio maneuvered the Likeness to do as he did: to genuflect, to speak words of prayer to Our Father in Heaven, to recite the Rosary, and to pass its gaze over the words of Scripture as though in careful study. In this way he strove to multiply the acts of adoration he dedicated to our Lord.
On the first day of January in this year 1265, the Likeness commenced the performance of these actions apparently of its own volition and under its own will.
After some weeks, the Likeness expressed a desire to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist. It need not be stated that in order to receive the Eucharist, one must first be baptized and confess one’s sins. In this case, in order for the Likeness to be baptized, Baptism itself being the cleansing of original sin, and to confess, the Church was obliged to determine that the Likeness was capable of sin, which is to say, that it possessed a soul which, in the way of souls, should remain subsistent when separated from the body and enter Hell or the Kingdom of God.
This is why Your Holiness sent me to the convent.
I endeavored first to determine that the friars of Santa Sabina were not being deceived, as by one of their own secretly manipulating the Likeness. I cannot believe open deception of my brothers, but Father Antonio’s adoration of the Likeness is known throughout the conventuale, and men express their love in strange and mysterious ways. Second, if the Likeness was decided to be genuine, I would determine the mechanism by which it operated of its own free will. Third, I would determine whether it possessed a soul by evaluating its behaviors according to the five genera of parts: vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive, and rational.
Upon my arrival at Santa Sabina, I was led at once to the Minor Basilica, where Father Antonio knelt with the Likeness, which had assumed an identical position.
Father Antonio informed the Likeness of the reason for my presence, and the Likeness greeted me with pleasant warmth. I was struck by this, for the face-plate of the Likeness, though shining and beautifully wrought, is immobile, and one would not think the Likeness capable of expression. The face-plate lacked a jaw, so that it only depicted the upper three-quarters of a man’s face, and the wooden jaw moved up and down upon an iron hinge. The rest of the Likeness’s body, too, was composed of wooden limbs, each meticulously carved to resemble the corresponding limb of a human being and attached by iron hinges at the joints’ hinges. These hinges had once been regularly oiled by Father Antonio; now the Likeness oiled its own hinges and wooden body so that the grain shone, and it polished its face-plate, while the Dominican Friars performed their ablutions.
I found myself experiencing a vague sense of unease.
For the following two days, I shadowed the Likeness as it imitated the behavior of the friars. It was true that the Likeness behaved precisely like one devoted to our Lord. On the third day, in order to preclude the possibility of human manipulation of the Likeness, I requested permission to disassemble it. Father Antonio responded vociferously. However, the Likeness, though it had become rigid upon my request, expressed after a moment a willingness to be dismantled if it meant that it would ultimately be permitted to receive the Eucharist, provided Father Antonio, and only Father Antonio, would reassemble him.
I ordered Father Antonio to stand twenty feet away while I operated upon the Likeness. He did so, seething openly, while I carefully removed the Likeness’s shining face-plate. Underneath the face-plate the wood was rough, even splintered. I manipulated the jaw. I also removed the jaw and its accompanying hinges, revealing a hollow within what would be, in a human, the throat. I reached into this hollow—the Likeness was so stiff as to be almost trembling, which struck me as queer, since its body contained no muscles—and felt, very delicately, the box strung with catgut, and the pipe that led to the bellows within. After this, I withdrew my hand and felt the Likeness’s body all up and down, and studied the pump-and-pulley mechanism that had allowed Father Antonio to manipulate the Likeness before falling into disuse, and knocked the Likeness’s torso. At this point, I determined that my examination had been sufficient, and I permitted Father Antonio to reattach the Likeness’s face-plate and jaw.
Both Father Antonio and the Likeness expressed surprise that I did not conduct a more thorough inspection of the Likeness’s physical form. Your Holiness may be surprised as well. I will say only that the responses of both the Likeness and Father Antonio to the examination were the responses of a man to violence, and the Lord detests those who do violence, as we know from the Psalms.
My examination was certainly sufficient to determine that the Likeness operates according to its own volition, free of external manipulation. It remained only to be determined the mechanism by which the Likeness was able to operate of its own free will, and whether it possessed a soul.
The Likeness, upon questioning, was not able to present a supposition as to the engine that allowed it to move, speak, and apparently think. Father Antonio, however, believed that nine years of repeating the same movements of worship under his guidance, each day the same as the one before, caused the Likeness to learn these movements and to execute them independently.
I said somewhat sternly that if Father Antonio was correct, then he had provided evidence that the Likeness did not possess a soul. For if the Likeness was only imitating the actions of a man devoted to God, he was not expressing his own devotion. Thus can an animal stand on its hind legs without walking upright as a man.
I devised a test.
I instructed both the Likeness and Friar Antonio to compose a tractate on the purpose of worship. At this time, I learned that the Likeness is unable to read or write, and thus he was obliged to dictate his tractate to a scribe, one unstudied in the theological arts, summoned for that purpose. I withdrew into the central compartment of the confessional in the Minor Basilica, and both tractates were slid under the curtain. I read both, studying carefully the language and the thoughts expressed, in an attempt to decide which tractate had been written by a human mind and which was mere imitation.
Both texts were coherent. Though one was more plainly written than the other, each was equally considered. Strangest of all, they diverged in opinion.
I was unable to tell which tractate had been written by Father Antonio, and which had been dictated by the Likeness.
I confess I was greatly troubled. Slowly I emerged from the confessional, and I could see that Father Antonio and the Likeness could read my distress upon my countenance. I was obliged to retreat for a long time to the library, where I meditated on the problem for many hours, and prayed to the Lord for guidance.
At last I emerged to present my findings to the Likeness, Father Antonio, and the other friars who had gathered round, and I present these findings now to Your Holiness:
“It is only to be concluded that the Likeness does embody the powers of the soul: these being vegetative, for the Likeness grew from an inanimate creature into an animate one; appetitive, for the Likeness desires to receive the Eucharist; sensitive, for the Likeness responded with fear and disgust to my examination of its body; locomotive, for the Likeness moves and acts in accordance with its desires; and rational, for the Likeness expresses its beliefs in language. If Father Antonio is correct, the Likeness has learned its habits through imitation, but pure imitation would account only for the locomotive and rational powers of the soul and not the foundational genera. Hence it is necessary to say that the Likeness possesses a soul.
“I have sought, too, to determine the mechanism by which the Likeness has been granted its soul, and I tell you: As God brought all things into being from nothing, so has he done with the soul of the Likeness. It is true that creation, including the creation of the soul, is the act of God alone; but we must allow, also, for the working of miracles, which proceed from God’s omnipotence.
“Thus we must acknowledge that the Likeness has a soul, and so may the Likeness be baptized into the faith.”
The Likeness’s beaten gold face was incapable of smiling. But it threw its arms around Father Antonio and then myself, overcome by joy. And in its joy, as in the joy of a small child, I recognized the spirit of the Lord.
Author’s Note: At one point in time, I found myself wondering what the highest ambition of a sentient artificial intelligence might be. I concluded that, like the Little Mermaid, a robot might wish to have a soul. To me, a woman raised in the Catholic Church, the concept of a soul has certain theological implications, so I thought it would be very interesting if the robot also wanted to be baptized. But how would you—or the Church—be able to tell if the robot really did have a soul? And what would it mean, theologically, if it did? Saint Thomas Aquinas would certainly have opinions on the subject!
Mary Berman is a Philadelphia, PA, USA-based writer of mostly speculative fiction. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi, and her work has been published in PseudoPod, Cicada, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere. Find her online at www.mtgberman.com or read her monthly creative writing newsletter at mtgberman.substack.com.
Content note (click for details)Content note: Grief, fraught family relationships, gaslighting.
[user graciegirl2006!? is logged in]
[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!
[graciegirl2006!?] But this is so specific. It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t even know what I was thinking searching for that; I called the police and then I just… I didn’t know what else to do.
[Guide] Well, you did the right thing! Part of our service is to help you with all of your monster/creature/demon-related issues.
[graciegirl2006!?] Bad enough that my mom just died and now this.
[Guide] We’re sorry to hear that :(
[graciegirl2006!?] We had a complicated relationship, you know? I loved her, but she was a tough woman. Cold.
[Guide] So, while we do have a guide for grief management after losing someone to a monster/creature/demon ($15.99 in our online store!), unfortunately, this guide is more focused on the giant living brain issue you’ve got going on.
[graciegirl2006!?] Okay, yeah, sure. Sorry. Where do I start?
[Guide] Let’s begin by establishing a visual baseline. Basically, what does the brain look like? If it’s a yellow, jaundice-like color or a grey like a newspaper (remember those?), then that’s great! Even if it’s got some brain juice pumping through it, that thing is on its way out the door. If this is the case, consider yourself one of the lucky ones! We’ll skip to explaining proper giant living brain disposal. Sorry you paid the full $15.99 for this guide only to find out you didn’t need much help!
[graciegirl2006!?] It’s pink, I guess. Not jaundice.
[Guide] Then you’re in the right place! From what you’re saying, I can assume the brain in front of you (I hope it’s in front of you; letting a healthy, sentient brain out of your sight is not advised!) is standard-issue pink. Very brain-like. This means that your mother left you a healthy living brain you have to deal with. Don’t freak out! You’re smart and you’re prepared for this. You bought this guide for a reason, and we’re going to get through this together.
[graciegirl2006!?] I just don’t understand where this thing came from. Mom never mentioned anything like this, and it wasn’t here last I checked.
[Guide] How long since you’ve been down in the basement?
[graciegirl2006!?] I didn’t visit a lot. Years, probably. She was only 65. I thought there was time.
[Guide] Well, there you go! You can transport and set up a living brain in a weekend.
[graciegirl2006!?] Could she have done this on purpose? Left me something to have to deal with?
[Guide] Maybe? Our company has never met your mother and, considering her current state of existence, we never will (unfortunate for us, I’m sure!).
[graciegirl2006!?] She always used to do that, leave shit for me to clean up. I remember one time she had me literally call one of her boyfriends to tell him that she wanted to break up. Isn’t that crazy? She said that I was an “intelligent modern woman” and I could handle it.
[Guide] Now again, we don’t know your mom, but before we continue, I have to say that it’s best if you put aside any anger you may feel toward your mother for leaving this on your shoulders, whether she did it on purpose or not. Not only is this good for your soul (if you believe in that kind of business), but it can help you survive this ordeal, since it’s a very real possibility that living brains can sense fear and use it against you. You don’t need those kinds of complications!
But also, think of it this way: If nothing else, this is a testament to your poor deceased mother’s dedication and ability to keep a nutritionally complicated and metabolically volatile living brain alive in a basement. That’s kinda cool, huh?
[graciegirl2006!?] I never said I was mad at my mom.
[Guide] Sounded like you were!
[graciegirl2006!?] I’m not, I just said that leaving a mess for me to clean up is very much in character for her.
[Guide] Seems like you got it all figured out, then!
[graciegirl2006!?] Shit, it just moved a little, what do I do?
[Guide] Now’s the time to assess just how dangerous this living brain is. The main thing you’re going to want to look out for is whether or not the brain has long arm-like tendrils. They’ll look like fleshy ropes. If you see these, do not approach the brain! These tendrils may look skinny and weak, but they are capable of crushing a human skull like it’s a peanut shell. I’ve seen it happen!
[graciegirl2006!?] That sounds horrifying, Jesus.
[Guide] It’s honestly pretty cool in a National-Geographic-special kind of way, but, it goes without saying, it’s only cool if it’s not your skull being crushed.
Now, if there are no tendrils, then you’re in the clear, unless this particular brain has any external telepathy-like abilities, but we’ll deal with that later.
[graciegirl2006!?] What the hell? Like it can read my thoughts? Or control my mind?
[Guide] No way! More like some… How do I put this? There is a possibility that giant brains have some internal-to-external mind abilities involving people and/or home electronics and appliances. It’s all very patchy, though, so no need to worry your little head about it.
[graciegirl2006!?] I’m very worried.
[Guide] No need! This is less about “control,” more “bursts of influence” that we’re talking here, if that puts your mind at ease.
[graciegirl2006!?] It doesn’t. Can it control my phone? My microwave?
[Guide] I think we’re jumping the gun a little! Don’t concern yourself with that yet, we’ll cover all of this later.
[graciegirl2006!?] Sounds like something we need to address now.
[Guide] Remember, you’re using this guide for a reason. We’ve dealt with this many times. I promise I’ll get to it later, okay? Now, what’s the tendril situation looking like?
[graciegirl2006!?] I can’t tell if there are arm-things or not. Maybe? I don’t want to get close. Sorry, I’m still struggling with why mom has a giant brain down here. Makes no sense.
[Guide] Alright, I see we’re stuck on this. The emotional stuff is, I’m going to be honest, not my thing, but for the sake of moving on to the meat and potatoes of killing this living brain that may or may not have skull-crushing tendrils, let’s get this out of the way.
So, from my experience, there are two main possibilities as to why your mom was keeping a brain in her basement and didn’t find it necessary to tell you.
The first possibility is that your mother (have we mentioned how sorry we are to hear about her passing?) was keeping this abomination unto the lord as a pet of some sort. To determine this, you’re going to want to give the brain a bit of a general vibe check. Good vibes all around? Positive energy? An aura that you’d describe as happy?
How about its hue? Are its pinks extra pink? Does the translucent film covering the brain glisten in a way that could only come from knowing true affection, from the knowledge that love is not simply a chemical reaction beneficially bonding us together and thus boosting the survival of our species, but is in fact an unexplainable yet very real spiritual phenomenon?
These are all signs that your mother had been treating this thing as a pet. Also, you might see some toys around the basement. Giant mutant brains tend to like the squeaky kind.
[graciegirl2006!?] I’m not sure about the vibes, I’m not very good at this… No toys or anything, though. Not that I can see.
[Guide] Remember to be objective in your assessment. Don’t fall into beginners’ traps!
[graciegirl2006!?] Beginners’ traps?
[Guide] For example, you might assume that because your mom didn’t let you have a dog when you were a kid, she would never keep a brain as a pet.
[graciegirl2006!?] What are you talking about? Did I mention not getting a dog?
[Guide] You must have put it in the About Me box when you signed in!
[graciegirl2006!?] I don’t remember doing that.
[Guide] Weird! Lucky guess, then? But to continue: Holding onto your anger over the dog is silly, because there are, of course, lots of possible reasons why she didn’t let you have a pet and yet came around to having this brain in her basement, such as loneliness in her advanced years, or her simply believing that you were too juvenile or irresponsible or otherwise unfit to have a dog. Or, let’s be honest, you simply didn’t deserve one based on your poor behavior.
[graciegirl2006!?] I was a good kid.
[Guide] I’m sure you were! But the subjectivity of the word “good” might not be doing you any favors here.
[graciegirl2006!?] Actually, she promised I could get a dog at one point. A husky. I was going to name him Maxwell. But first, she told me I had to help her get the house ready for guests she was having over. Old college friends, I think.
[Guide] Hindsight is 20/20! We all make mistakes as children. Live and learn, all that jazz.
[graciegirl2006!?] No, but that’s the thing. I did help her. I did everything she asked and more and… she still didn’t let me have a dog. She never followed through, always said things would work out, and they never did. And she always had an excuse, a reason why I shouldn’t be mad. Like, she said not getting the dog would be good for me in the long run, that disappointment was character building. You know, me being a modern young woman and all, I could handle it.
[Guide] Well, I guess we’ll take her word for it! Now, the second and most common possibility is that the brain is some kind of science experiment. This one should be fairly obvious to decipher. Are there wires or tubes to the brain? Are there notebooks scattered around containing indecipherable formulas? Are there beakers filled with neon-colored goo? Any one of these is a dead giveaway that your deceased mother was using this giant living brain as some kind of guinea pig in a sick, playing-God-like scenario.
[graciegirl2006!?] There are some wires, a few notebooks, I guess.
[Guide] Seems promising! Now, keep in mind, within the category of giant-brain-as-godless-science-experiment, there are two subcategories. The first is that the brain you’re looking at (again, keep an eye on that darn thing!) is the same brain your mom experimented on and has the same consciousness it’s always had. This category is the more straightforward of the two. The other, more complicated category is that your mother is in fact not dead, and has instead transferred her consciousness to this living brain as a way of staving off what she must have perceived as the quickly encroaching void of death.
[graciegirl2006!?] How do I tell the difference?
[Guide] You seem like a very reasonable person who can take some direct—if somewhat unpleasant—news, so I’m just gonna lay it right on you: There’s no great way to tell. It’s not like the brain has a mouth and can tell you that it contains your mother’s consciousness. (Unless it does, in which case the thing in front of you is not technically a living brain and you’ve purchased the wrong guide. Our apologies! While we don’t offer refunds, we do have an interactive guide on how to deal with giant living blobs that can speak, only $15.99! Check our website!) You could read through all your mother’s notebooks to see what she was up to, but there’s no way you’re gonna understand all that science junk and her handwriting was never great and nobody has the time so we’re going to treat both subcategories exactly the same. Just generally be aware that when you kill this thing, you may also be murdering the last inkling of your mother’s existence at the same time.
Moving on!
[graciegirl2006!?] I’m not sure I want to do this anymore. The police are still coming, I think. They should be here soon; maybe I should just wait for them.
[Guide] Glad to see you’re not letting this situation turn you into an immoral monster killer driven by bloodlust, but alas, it must be done. Giant living brains present a real “one of us must die” scenario for the person who discovers them, and bringing more people into the situation only makes things more complicated. Do you want more people to get hurt? And wouldn’t you rather kill the brain than be killed by it?
[graciegirl2006!?] Okay, I guess. So, how do I kill it then?
[Guide] Great question!
To begin with, no matter what the situation, you’re going to want to find something sharp and long that can penetrate the brain completely. A sword is ideal, or maybe a long wooden picket with the end shaved to a point. If your dead mom was the kind of person to have a giant living brain in her basement, then she’s definitely got some weird shit down there. There has to be something fit for brain murder. Improvise! I can’t hold your hand through everything!
[graciegirl2006!?] There’s a shovel.
[Guide] That the best you got?
[graciegirl2006!?] Yup.
[Guide] Not ideal, but it’ll have to do!
So, the easiest scenario is that this thing was a pet. Pet means trusting, domesticated. Approach it carefully, of course, but this should be cake. If there are squeaky toys around, use one of those to distract the brain, then when you’re close enough, plunge the shovel (I wish you had something sharper!) right into the middle. It’ll probably start squirming and pulsing violently, fighting to live. Don’t panic! Back up (and step to the side, as the pulsing may cause your weapon to be ejected from the brain in the opposite direction of penetration) and let the thing die. It may take a while, but once its color starts to dull, you’ll know you did well, and you’re now a giant-brain-killer of the highest order.
[graciegirl2006!?] I already told you there were no toys. I don’t think it was a pet.
[Guide] Just being thorough! And the lack of toys doesn’t 100% guarantee your mother wasn’t raising this thing as a pet. She may have just not been a very good giant-living-brain mother, we don’t know.
[graciegirl2006!?] I don’t believe that. She took good care of me.
[Guide] I guess you haven’t revisited that high school journal of yours in a while! But moving on: If this thing is an experiment, you can assume it was tested on against its will. This almost certainly means it’s angry, probably evil, definitely human-hating. In this case, you first want to unplug any and all machines or tubes that may be attached to the brain since some of these may be keeping it alive.
[graciegirl2006!?] Sorry to interrupt again, but I’m still stuck on this pseudo-telepathy thing.
[Guide] This again? Right in the middle of killing this living brain? You’re really showing a weak underbelly to this brain. Your odds aren’t looking good!
[graciegirl2006!?] Okay, okay. So, there’s some kind of monitor looking thing with wires that’s running. I crushed it with the shovel.
[Guide] A bit crude, but effective! Now we’re speaking the same language. Your odds for survival just went way up! For the next step, there are a couple schools of thought on how to handle these situations, but here is my recommendation: If there are no tendrils, then once you unplug the machines, proceed by killing the brain in much the same way as described above.
If the brain does have tendrils, though, then after you unplug the machines, you want to step back, and wait for it to (hopefully) die on its own. Give it a full day; don’t be too eager. You don’t want to have to fight off tendrils if you don’t have to. If the color isn’t starting to turn sickly after the full 24, then you’re going to have to go ahead and fight the thing.
[graciegirl2006!?] I called the cops, remember?
[Guide] You’re right, time is of the essence! In that case, there’s not a lot I can say here except you need to be bold, move quickly, and don’t underestimate the skull-crushing strength of those evil brain tendrils. Good luck! Hope you survive!
[graciegirl2006!?] I can’t help thinking about what you said about the brain having my mom’s consciousness.
[Guide] Is this a morality concern? Because my response would be: If this brain has your mom’s consciousness baked into its scrotum-like flesh, your mother did some real deal-with-the-devil type shit, which frees you from moral qualms over murdering a living thing.
[graciegirl2006!?] But it’s my mother.
[Guide] Well, if you’re having second thoughts, then just put the shovel away and close this guide, because we’re done here.
[graciegirl2006!?] No, no, sorry. Doing it. Killing it now.
[Guide] Go for it, girl!
[graciegirl2006!?] I did it. It’s so bloody and gross. I want to throw up.
[Guide] Congrats! I know we just met, but I’m proud of you despite your weak stomach! Many warriors stronger than you have died at the hands of giant sentient brains. Consider yourself among rarified air.
[graciegirl2006!?] Thanks, I guess. I just puked, though. What now?
[Guide] So, now that the brain is dead, you’re going to want to get rid of the thing before selling your dead mom’s house.
[graciegirl2006!?] I don’t understand how you know I want to sell Mom’s house.
[Guide] You sure you didn’t mention it?
[graciegirl2006!?] Definitely not.
[Guide] Lucky guess, then!
[graciegirl2006!?] Okay then… so how do I dispose of the brain?
[Guide] First, get yourself a pair of gloves, several black garbage bags, and some kind of cutting utensil to slice the brain into the smallest pieces possible. I highly recommend something with a serrated edge, which will lead to the least labor-intensive way of cutting through that thick mutant brain matter, but any knife can do the job if you give it enough elbow grease.
[graciegirl2006!?] I got a serrated bread knife from the kitchen.
[Guide] Perfect!
[graciegirl2006!?] I cut it up.
[Guide] Then you’re done! Toss the pieces in the trash and you can forget this whole thing ever happened.
[graciegirl2006!?] Hold on, I don’t… I don’t think it’s dead.
[Guide] What do you mean?
[graciegirl2006!?] It’s still moving. The pieces of the brain.
[Guide] Well, that’s a bit unexpected, I must say!
[graciegirl2006!?] What do I do? Is this thing still dangerous? The bits are starting to move a lot.
[Guide] Like always, I’m going to be straight with you here: I have no idea what’s going on right now with the brain.
[graciegirl2006!?] What are you talking about? This is a guide for this specific situation, how did you not plan for this? You’ve never had a brain that was cut up and didn’t die?
[Guide] I think maybe we as an organization have bitten off more than we can chew here. Plus, didn’t you say that the police were called? The boys in blue should be here any minute! They always make situations better.
[graciegirl2006!?] You told me I should avoid the police.
[Guide] Well, the situation has taken a turn for the worse, it seems!
[graciegirl2006!?] This is so much worse than when I called them, though, because now I have a cut up brain here that won’t die and I’m covered in blood and vomit. I look like a murderer. Someone is going to get hurt or I’m going to jail because I trusted that you knew what you were doing.
[Guide] Hey, we got you most of the way there, that has to count for something?
[graciegirl2006!?] It doesn’t.
[Guide] It should!
[graciegirl2006!?] I don’t even know what to say to the cops when they come.
[Guide] You’ll figure it out! Remember, you’re a smart, modern young woman who was able to kill (mostly!) a giant living brain with nothing but her brain and her courage. You can talk your way out of this, easy.
[graciegirl2006!?] I really don’t want to have to… wait. What did you say?
[Guide] Which part?
[graciegirl2006!?] I… did you just call me a “modern young woman?”
[Guide] It’s possible! But we’re getting off topic here. Would you like me to recommend a book on talking to people who are brandishing weapons and have the authority to kill you? I think we have something in our library. I bet I can get you a discount if I talk to my…
[graciegirl2006!?] Mom?
[Guide] Excuse me?
[graciegirl2006!?] She’s the only one that called me that. Modern young woman. It’s a stupid phrase, doesn’t mean anything. She thought using it would soften the disappointment, somehow.
[Guide] Uh… you mentioned it before. I guess I picked up on it then?
[graciegirl2006!?] Hold on. What were you saying about the telepathic abilities of the brain or whatever?
[Guide] Was I talking about that?
[graciegirl2006!?] You definitely were.
[Guide] Must have slipped my mind! But okay, telepathy, got it, it’s time, let’s talk about that. So, evil giant brains, like I said, have been known to tap into things. It’s all very uneven, bits of information at a time. Nothing concrete. An imperfect process as far as we can tell.
[graciegirl2006!?] So, the evil brain in my mom’s basement could be controlling me right now?
[Guide] Holy smokes, what a dark question! Anything’s possible, but it’s unlikely. Human brains are pretty complex!
[graciegirl2006!?] But you said it could maybe control electronics? Like a microwave maybe?
[Guide] Also possible! But there’s no way to be sure.
[graciegirl2006!?] Or a computer program.
[Guide] If I could think of another way to say “It’s possible but I don’t know,” I would definitely do that now.
[graciegirl2006!?] Mom? Are you in there somewhere?
[Guide] We’re not your mom.
[graciegirl2006!?] Mommy?
[Guide] Again, we’re not your mom.
[graciegirl2006!?] Why are you still doing this?
[Guide] Still not your mother, Grace.
[graciegirl2006!?] I would have forgiven you, you know that, right? For everything. For the dog, for whatever mess you got into here. You could have told me about the brain, we could have dealt with this together.
[Guide] In her defense, not sure how your dead mother could have told you anything from beyond the grave!
[graciegirl2006!?] You went through all of this trouble to… what? Mind control me into killing a giant brain? That maybe has your consciousness baked into it? Help me understand, Mom.
[Guide] As discussed, it doesn’t seem likely that the brain would be able to control a human.
[graciegirl2006!?] Whatever it is, mind control, telekinetic influence, nudging a computer program to get me to act a certain way. It’s all the same type of manipulation you used to do when I was a kid. It’s the same as promising me a dog and then telling me that not having one builds character. You know, you could have been honest with me, right? Why is honesty so hard for you?
[Guide] This seems very personal! Not for our consumption!
[graciegirl2006!?] You always did this. No follow through.
[Guide] Not sure what I should be saying here, Grace. Not sure what you want me to say.
[graciegirl2006!?] I hear the sirens coming, the police will be down here soon, find me covered in blood and brain guts. I love you, Mom. Okay? But I’m done doing this, following along with your promises, hoping things work out. You’ve never been able to come clean, but I want you to know that I’m going to tell them everything and hope for the best. Maybe they’ll believe my story, maybe not. But I’m going to do what you could never do. I’m going to own up to my mistakes and accept the consequences.
[Guide] Okay, since your arrest appears to be imminent, I’ll say this: I’m not your mother (that doesn’t make sense!), but if I were a, let’s say, a computer program that was being influenced by brain waves emanating from the giant living brain that she was accidentally taken over by, I’d say this: I wasn’t always a good mother, I know that. I made bad decisions and I didn’t know how to fix them right. A dog would have been too much for me, okay? I’m sorry to put it on you, but how do you tell your daughter that you’re overwhelmed and terrified of keeping another living creature from dying? I thought making a commitment would put my back against the wall, force me to follow through. But I couldn’t do it. And I also couldn’t have it be my fault; you’d never have trusted me again if it was my fault, so I had to make it your fault instead. As for everything else… I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you, sorry if I dumped all of my bullshit on you. I’m just… so sorry, okay? I thought that giving you a brain to kill would be a good thing, a clean slate, a moment of triumph. But I can see now that it’s the same shit, the same pattern. Do you understand, though? I was trying to let you be free from me. I was really trying, I wanted to do it this time, I wanted to finally follow through with something, I just fucked it up.
Please tell me you understand. Please tell me you forgive me. Before it’s too late. Please say you forgive me.
Author’s Note: I wanted to write a story about cross-generational trauma and how we deal with it after a toxic person has passed away. What is left behind? How do we move on when there’s no longer an option for closure? Science fiction has the amazing ability to take normal things and ideas and make them strange and unfamiliar, so in this case, the effects of a mother’s narcissism on her daughter takes the form of a giant (possibly evil, likely mind-controlling) brain left in her basement that her daughter has to deal with.
Alex Sobel is a psychiatric nurse and writer (when he finds the time). His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Electric Literature, The Saturday Evening Post, and Dark Matter Magazine. He lives in Toledo, OH, with his wife.
Diabolical Plots is bidding a fond farewell to Kel Coleman, who is stepping down from their position on the editorial team to pursue rest, as well as other creative endeavors.
For those who don’t know, our working relationship with Kel started on the story side of things, when we had the opportunity to publish “A Study of Sage” in February 2021 (my first sale! – kel). Not long after, they joined the editorial team, resolving submissions for submission windows, helping to determine final acceptances, and editing stories for publication.
Kel also contributed to discussions about updating submission guidelines and publication policies, as well as reaching out to authors to establish working relationships. And they’ve been a big part of planning something I can’t talk about yet. We’re excited to see it come to fruition and we can’t wait to give them a shout-out when the time comes.
It has been a pleasure working with Kel, and I hope to have the opportunity to work with them again in the future. (the feeling is mutual! – kel)
If you’ve played either of the two recent Nintendo Switch-based Legend of Zelda games (Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom) long enough, you know Hestu, the most distinct of the Koroks. After playing these games and other games in the Legend of Zelda series for many, many hours, I have “discovered” (developed a headcanon) that explains the secret origins of Hestu and why Hestu is different from all the other Koroks.
Who Is Hestu?
If you’re not familiar: The Koroks are forest spirits whose home is in the Korok Forest which is protected from the outside world by The Lost Woods which earns its name by being filled with a confounding fog that will take you back at the entrance if you wander from a pre-set path. Although that’s their home, they can be found all over Hyrule, approximately a thousand of them to find in little hiding spaces (plus some more that aren’t hiding). Koroks as a whole look like little roughly crafted humanoid child-like figures with a big leaf for their face. Each Korok looks a little different, from the color and shape of the leaf to the exact proportions of their body but generally they look like this. They can be found hiding under rocks, or will appear from nowhere if you win little shooting games or spatial puzzles or other little challenges. They are generally childish and fun-loving and love to play hide-and-seek. Tears of the Kingdom added a recurring new kind of Korok: the traveling Korok who is going to visit a friend but has packed such a large backpack that it has grown too tired too move. Finding or helping this multitude of Koroks will give you the reward of Korok seeds. Which is a little weird if you think about it–are those like Korok babies? Apparently the game-makers intended them to be Korok poops.
The use for poop-scooping for the Korok kids is unclear until you meet Hestu. After helping with a side quest in Breath of the Wild to recover Hestu’s magical maracas, he asks if you can help him find all the Korok seeds that the mischievous little Koroks have stolen from him, and whenever you do Hestu will perform a magical dance that will expand your weapon, bow, or shield inventory slots.
Okay, so what is Hestu’s backstory? After playing Breath of the Wild, and after playing Tears of the Kingdom for dozens of hours, I had not really given it any thought at all. Why does he need a backstory? He’s the forest spirit dude who expands your inventory and while he is likeable and funny and useful, does he really need a backstory? Until the connection spontaneously popped into my head.
Hestu’s Origin
I randomly realized where Hestu came from: Tingle finally fulfilled his greatest wish to become a fairy. Hestu is Tingle transformed!
I will go into more detail below, but even superficially they have quite a few similarities. They are both adults with facial hair (OK Hestu’s beard is a leaf, but it appears to be in the place of facial hair), taking on the appearance in some way of an adult version of the Great Deku Tree’s children. They both have a love of words they made up (“Kooloo-Limpah” vs “Shak-Shakala”, though the latter is probably onomatopoeia for the sound of maracas, it is not a common onomatopoeia as far as I am aware). They both have a preference for glitter.
Wait, Who?
OK, so if you’ve only played the Zelda games on Nintendo Switch you might not know who Tingle is.
Tingle first appeared in Majora’s Mask which was released in the year 2000. Tingle claimed to be the reincarnation of a fairy, something which has been a central part of his character in all of his appearances. He is 35 years old and his father who works at the swamp tourist center is exasperated by his son’s insistence that he is a fairy. Tingle wears a green jumpsuit with a pointy hood, presumably meant to resemble Link’s classical outfit of a green tunic with a pointy hat. He can often be found in that game floating above a scene attached to a big red balloon. If you pop the balloon he will fall to the ground and will sell you maps of different areas.
He’s appeared in several other games, most notably in The Wind Waker where he has a more prominent role, but keeps the same backstory, claiming to be a fairy.
Supporting Evidence
Bear with me, there are quite a few pieces of information I took into account for this theory.
Tingle does not directly appear in the Switch games, but he is referenced. There is a “Tingel Island” on the east coast of Hyrule. In the Breath of the Wild expansion pack, and in the regular Tears of the Kingdom game, there is a Tingle clothing set. The clothing set could be an alt universe thing, like a branched timeline–it seems like at least some of the Link-themed clothing sets come from alternate universes, so Tingle’s might be the same. But Tingel Island seems like more of a solid clue that it’s not only an alt universe reference. So I think that could be interpreted as meaning that Tingle has existed by that name in the universe.
When Tingle says he is a fairy, what does that mean? Generally when the Zelda series refers to a “fairy” it is most often referring to a tiny flying glowing creature with transparent butterfly wings. These tend to be able to heal damage to Link instantaneously, or when collected and stored in Link’s inventory may be able to revive Link from what would otherwise be fatal damage. There are also fairies with the same appearance (such as Navi, and Tatl) that help Link by helping him target or by giving him advice.
There are also the Great Fairies which tend to take the appearance of giant women who reside in pools of water and grant Link boons (enhanced clothing or better weapons or shields) in exchange for something (money or monster parts or other things).
But I don’t think Tingle is referring to either of these kinds of fairy. His wardrobe is the biggest clue. Majora’s Mask is a direct sequel to The Ocarina of Time. In The Ocarina of Time, Link has grown up in the Deku Forest. He thinks that he is a Kokiri, one of the forest children who all have fairy companions except for Link. But it turns out that Link is not a Kokiri–his lack of fairy is a clue, but the other Kokiri can also not leave the Deku Forest, and the other Kokiri do not age as Link does in Ocarina of Time. For the actual Kokiri, the fairy seems to be an intrinsic part of their existence–there is no Kokiri without a fairy. From a distance, you can’t see the childlike Kokiri, only the flying fairy companion and the Kokiri fades in as you approach. My interpretation of this is that the fairy is the more real or solid one of the pair, and the childlike form is just a projection from this particular variety of fairy. So, in my interpretation, a Kokiri not only has a fairy companion, it is a fairy and Tingle’s wardrobe is meant to show that.
The next step to understand here is that Kokiri are equivalent to Korok (I had not recalled that this detail was supported by game canon in The Wind Waker, at least according to this wiki page). They both have their primary home in a forest connected to the Lost Woods, with their guardian the Great Deku Tree. They are both childlike in both appearance and behavior (apart from Hestu who has a more adultlike proportion and size, but again Hestu appears to be anomalous). To be fair, their appearance differs, and the Koroks are not limited by the boundaries of the forest. If they are equivalent, what accounts for the differences? Apparently the great flood that caused the world to be a series of islands in The Wind Waker caused the transformation. But it’s not uncommon in the series of the games for familiar things to take very different forms from one game to another. In the original Legend of Zelda game the Zora were just another monster, popping their head out of water to shoot fireballs at Link, but through the different games we have seen that they are sentient being, so we have seen how vastly different a species or race can be from game to game. The shift between Kokiri and Korok is less far-fetched than the shift of the Zoras.
Other Theories About the Anomaly of Hestu
I have wondered since I started playing Breath of the Wild years ago, why there are approximately one-thousand childlike Koroks and then there is one adultlike Korok. What life cycle accounts for this? I wondered if the Koroks are an invasive species and the Deku Tree eats them when they get to be a certain age to avoid them crowding out all other life in Hyrule. I wondered if they are always childlike and Hestu is some kind of random genetic variation. I wondered if the Koroks have a social hierarchy like bees, where changes can be triggered by environmental factors like diet, and the Great Deku Tree is the queen, and Hestu is the queen in training meant to take over the hive when the Deku Tree dies (we know the Deku Tree can die, as it did die in Ocarina of Time).
How It Happened
My thought is: Although Tingle has declared that he is a fairy, I think some part of him realizes that he is not a fairy in any objective sense. So, knowing what he wants, he sets out to find a way to become a fairy. He can either see the Koroks, or read about them in some storybook or heard about them in some myth so he finds out where they came from and goes on a quest to find their home. He eventually finds a way through the Lost Woods and approaches the Deku Tree as a supplicant, begging the Deku Tree to make him into a Korok. The Deku Tree considers for a time, and finally agrees, with a condition. The Deku Tree will turn Tingle into a Korok, if Tingle takes responsibility for all the other Koroks. It’s hard to be a parent to something like one thousand mischievous children who won’t grow up, when you’re ancient and very tired, and also when you’re literally a tree so you can’t even chase them around. A responsible adult Korok, on the other hand, would have much more energy and mobility to caretake the Koroks. Because Tingle is an adult when he was transformed, he took the form of an adult Korok even though that was unprecedented.
Conclusion
Hestu may not canonically be Tingle. But, I don’t think it’s unbelievable that the writers could’ve made it a possibility on purpose. Let me know what you think of the headcanon, if you have your own headcanon. Why do you think Hestu appears to be the only adultlike Korok?
Elemental is a CG animated film published in general release in June 2023 by Pixar. It takes place in Element City, which is populated entirely by people who each are elementals: creatures of the four classical elements of air, earth, water, and fire. It is, broadly speaking, a star-crossed romance story of two people from apparently incompatible cultures falling in love against the odds.
Note that this review contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to know major plot events, stop reading now.
The reason I feel compelled to write up a review for this movie is because, although I generally enjoyed the movie, it didn’t feel to me like the movie was really about what the movie and the marketing for the movie seemed to think that it was about and I wanted to post my opinions on the matter.
Bernie and Cinder Lumen, fire elements, move to Element City where they face distrust and xenophobia from the other elements who consider fire elementals dangerous. They settle in and make a life for themselves despite constant microaggressions from the other elementals as well as the challenges of living in a city that was clearly not designed with fire elementals in mind.
Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) start a store (the Fireplace) and they have a baby, Ember (Leah Lewis), who grows up to be a hot-tempered woman. Bernie dreams of passing the store on to her but has put it off for years because her temper gets in the way. She tends to lose her patience when staffing the store and when her temper gets out of control her temper literally stokes her flames and she starts things around her on fire.
One day, Bernie decides to leave Ember in charge of the store. She becomes overwhelmed with frustration and rushes to the basement so she doesn’t explode in front of the customers. Pipes start bursting and flooding the basement with water and though Ember tries to fix it by fusing the pipes with her fire, it’s not enough a water elemental named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) gets flushed into the basement with the water.
Wade is a city inspector and he immediately starts writing down code violations in the pipes. Ember tries to reason with him but although he seems to feel very conflicted judging by his constant flood of tears, but despite this he apparently feels compelled to submit the reports anyway, which will likely result in the city forcing the Fireplace to shut down.
This is supposed to be the meetcute, I guess, but it’s also where the narrative they seemed to be trying to convey and the narrative that I took from the story sharply diverged. We learn that Wade was on assignment from the city to investigate a leak in the city’s canals when he got sucked into the city plumbing. He was literally trapped in the pipes until a bit of jostling from Ember letting her temper loose in the basement which released him and he burst through the pipes.
So, even from this initial scene:
1. The city has sent a lone employee to investigate a major water leak that relates to a district of fire elementals for which water leaks can literally be lethal.
2. The city apparently has no way to monitor their own waterways. Waterways that could trap water elementals, or extinguish fire elementals.
3. The city has not apparently even considered the safety of their own employee, who can get sucked into and trapped in pipes. Why not send an earth elemental? Or at least send a pair of employees so that a second employee could call for help.
4. The fire district doesn’t need water. No one in the fire district pays for water. Why would they pay for what they have no use for and which could kill them or their neighbors. It was the city’s failure that there was any water in the pipes to leak in the first place.
5. Why does the fire district need to have their pipes up to code, for the water that isn’t supposed to be in their pipes in the first place? City bureaucracy can be an important force for good when it saves people from living in dangerous homes, reduces fire danger, or that kind of thing. But enforcing plumbing codes on a district where water in the plumbing already means that the city has failed in a major way that disregards the safety of its citizens is not a force for good. That’s government bloat for no good reason.
6. The movie doesn’t explicitly say this, but from the way that the events unfold, my interpretation is that the amount of water coming through the pipes was not what caused the catastrophic problem–it was Wade getting washed down the pipes by the water. The water that was a manifestation of the city’s failure to keep the pipes dry, washing their inspector who should never have been in the pipes, only through a combination of his own incompetence combined with the city’s lack of safety measures. Wade writing up citations for plumbing faults after his ass busted through the pipes is like the Kool-Aid Man writing citations for structural damage after he busts through a wall to spread the good word of sugary drinks. The city has caused this problem multiple times over.
7. The movie tries to convey that this is Ember’s fault, and that’ s the interpretation that is stuck to for most of the movie, but there is no reasonable justification for this interpretation. By losing her temper, she exposed the city’s incompetence and saved Wade’s life from starving to death in a city plumbing accident. The movie never admits Wade’s fault in the accident, and doesn’t seem to acknowledge that she saved his life. The only thing that is the Lumen family’s fault at all is not following city building codes that represent senseless government bloat.
8. Does Wade even have the authority to perform an inspection when he was only in the business in the first place because of his own incompetence causing an accident? Is this like police kicking a door down and saying they found the door open to enter without a warrant?
9. If plumbing inspections are required… how have they never happened before on this premises? Is the city supposed to be performing periodic inspections? Is there any attempt to educate residents of the fire district of the requirement for plumbing inspections and what those requirements are? The city has abdicated all responsibility, apparently.
I don’t know about anyone else but I did not find any of this endearing.
After all of this happens, Wade actually starts to listen to Ember and seems surprised that she has extenuating circumstances despite her clearly trying to explain those circumstances to him before he submitted his citiations. Wade was too busy being feeling sorry for himself to listen to the needs of the person whose life he was contributing to ruining.
So at this point Wade decides to bring Ember to his boss, Gale (Wendi McLendon-Covey), to plead a case for leniency to save the Fireplace from closure. They discuss how Wade had been sent to look for the leak in the canals and that’s why he was where he was, and they arrive at an arrangement where if Wade and Ember are able to find the source of the leak then the code violations will be forgiven.
Sigh. Okay, this has gotten even worse.
10. Although the representative of the city inspections has admitted that they have a problem that they haven’t been able to figure out how to solve, and that their inspector’s incompetence contributed to the incident, and that there shouldn’t have been water in those pipes in the first place, they continue to blame Ember.
11. They offer a “deal” for Ember to work uncompensated for the city, bypassing any semblance of a proper hiring process even for a freelancer, under threat of closing her family’s business if she doesn’t succeed in the task that the city has failed to do itself even though it has put in (admittedly meager) effort in the hands of the (admittedly incompetent) city inspector. That… sounds like extortion.
12. Despite this being supposedly important, the two resources they are sending on the job are Wade: their employee who has proven himself incompetent at performing the exact task he is being sent to perform yet again with no additional resources or training to make him better at the task then he was and who last time might have died in the pipes if not for Ember’s temper flareup, and someone who has no employment relationship with them and is certainly not covered by their insurance and WILL BE VERY LIKELY BE KILLED BY WATER WHILE THEY INVESTIGATE A WATER LEAK.
OK. So they go and find the leak, in surprisingly short time for something the city claims to have been looking into for a while. It is a crack in one of the supporting walls for the city canals which constantly have wake overflow from big boats passing through them.
They make an interim fix for the issue by plugging the gap with sandbags. They spend some time together enjoying each other’s company. But: Surprise surprise, the sandbags are not a sufficient fix for the wall and they soon give out as well. Ember uses her fire power to make a sturdier fix by transforming the sand in the sandbags into a structure of tempered glass to plug the game. Once again, Ember saves the city’s ass by fixing what they don’t seem inclined or capable of fixing.
Ember ends up breaking up with Wade after deciding that her family will never accept him. During a party where Bernie will retire and hand over the Fireplace to Ember, Wade arrives and declares his love for her and also incidentally mentions that Ember was to blame for the leak in the basement.
The city then comes and (surprisingly) performs its civic duty and inspects the tempered glass fix and deems it safe. But within about a day the tempered glass breaks. This causes the final major action of the movie as our heroes rush to save the fire district from the flood.
13. Seeing the canals as they investigate everything underlines a significant source of the problems: the city is designed to favor water people in every way. The canals are a terrible civic design with their uncontrolled wake splashover. In our own world, there are no-wake rules in many boat areas to prevent destruction of structures. Why aren’t the walls higher? Why aren’t there no-wake rules?
14. Wade, a specialist in city water inspections should have realized that the sandbags were only a temporary measure against the leak and instead of spending that time socializing he should have spent that time getting on the horn trying to get a proper fix in place to prevent major accident when the sandbags inevitably gave out.
15. The city almost showed a glimmer of competence when they actually inspected the tempered glass wall patch within a very short period of time of it being enacted. Which might have been a redeeming moment for them, if it hadn’t then failed within about a day of the inspection. What exactly are they inspecting for? Most inspections would require building materials to come from a specific approved list, and I gather that the tempered glass concept was novel enough that it wouldn’t have been on an approved list–and for good reason because they clearly had no concept of the long-term permanence of such a structure.
16. Wade “accidentally” revealing that Ember was the one who caused the leak in the basement during Bernie’s retirement party would have been a shitty thing to do, even if it were true. Which it wasn’t.
Up until his “accidental” revealing, I had thought Wade might be redeemable if he ever owned up to his own responsibility, accepted fault for the things that are his fault instead of hiding behind his tears and laying all the blame on those who don’t deserve it. But he never at any point in the narrative does any of this. When he revealed the false information that the leak was Ember’s fault in front of her family despite the fact that the leak was really the city’s fault (and their continued danger continues to be the city’s fault), and which was certainly more Wade’s fault than Ember’s fault, that he chose this junction to declare this false information is, in my opinion, irredeemable.
The city’s greatest failure in the movie is revealed when the patch in the wall breaks and they all have to fight to keep everyone in the fire district from being killed by the flood and Wade does a big heroic thing to help their family. For which I agree they should be grateful, but I wish they had not ended up together, or at least that Wade would have at the very least taken some basic responsibility instead of throwing Ember under the bus at the worst possible moment.
Of course, Ember and Wade ending up in a romantic relationship at the end of the movie is probably reasonably assumed to be a foregone conclusion because the movie is marketed and presented as a romance instead of (IMO) what it really is: a drama about the importance of the role of city government to keep its people safe, and the lives in peril that can be caused by that city government’s incompetence.
This is not quite the most submissions we have ever received in a window (that was 1938 in January 2021), but it is the most authors we’ve received submissions from and the most submissions we’ve received since we reduced the number of allowed submissions per author from 2 to only 1.
This window did take longer than we usually like them to take to fully resolve–a little over 3 months after the end of submission window. I think we should ask for some additional volunteers to join the first reader team–we haven’t done a volunteer run for a few years and as people get busy some of them step down or scale back so we’ll probably need to build the group back up again periodically.
For this submission window we welcomed two new assistant editors: Chelle Parker and Hal Y. Zhang, who helped resolve submissions and helped make the final selections listed below. They join the assistant editor team of Ziv Wities and Kel Coleman.
This window marked a few changes:
1. This is the first window we’ve run since generative “AI” was available enough that people were routinely using it to write fiction. In response the guidelines were updated to ask writers not to submit fiction written using it, the submission form asked writers to affirm that they did not use these programs in writing their work, and for writers who received acceptances the contract required them to state that as well. 2. We had previously had a “Withdraw” status in the system, but the status could only be set by the editor so the writer would have to email the editors to ask to have it withdrawn. In this window we added the ability to “self-serve” a withdrawal. This was added partway through the window so not everyone saw it. When the confirmation email gets sent it includes a withdrawal link that the author can use to withdraw on their own without needing to contact the editor. 3. We added a “Rewrite Request” functionality in the last few days. We occasionally did rewrite requests before but they were done completely apart from the system by email. Now rewrite requests are supported in the system with an official status. When the email is sent for the rewrite request, it copies the requesting editor and assistant editor so the writer can reply to ask questions or discuss. It also provides the author with a one-time link they can use to submit the rewrite. This link can be used even when there is no open window. If a writer submits during an open window the rewrite using this link doesn’t count against their submission limit for the window.
We accepted 25 stories from this general submission window (one of which we announced separately and already published due to time constraints)
These stories will all be published in 2023-2024; I look forward to sharing them with you!
And here is the list, in alphabetical order by author name:
The Lineup
Level One: Blowtorch by Jared Oliver Adams
St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test by Mary Berman
The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds by Renan Bernardo
The Lighthouse Keeper by Melinda Brasher
It Clings by Hammond Diehl
Ten Easy Steps To Destroying Your Enemies This Arbor Day by Rachael K. Jones
Hold the Sea Inside by Erin Keating
Batter and Pearl by Steph Kwiatkowski
The Gaunt Strikes Again by Rich Larson
Six-Month Assessment of Miracle-Fresh by Anne Liberton
Phantom Heart by Charlie B. Lorch
A Descending Arctic Excavation of Us by Sara S. Messenger
Song for a Star-Whale’s Ghost by Devin Miller
Eternal Recurrence by Spencer Nitkey
Letters From Mt. Monroe Elementary, Third Grade by Sarah Pauling
The Geist and/in/as the Boltzmann Brain by M. J. Pettit
In Tandem by Emilee Prado
Bone Talker, Bone Eater by D. S. Ravenhurst
Dreamwright Street by Mike Reeves-McMillan
This Week in Clinical Dance: Urgent Care at the Hastings Center by Lauren Ring
BUDDY RAYMOND’S NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO DRONE HUNTING by Gillian Secord
How to Kill the Giant Living Brain You Found In Your Mother’s Basement After She Died by Alex Sobel
They Are Dancing by John Stadelman
In the Shelter of Ghosts (already posted at the time this announcement is posted) by Risa Wolf
Content note (click for details)Content note: parental loss, wounds, face scars
When the mediums arrive, I don’t notice their scars. It’s their machine that grabs my attention, all pointed glass bulbs, copper wires, and metal rods. Like a four-foot square vacuum tube radio. I rub the belt buckle hidden in my tunic pocket as the six women in gray robes lug the machine up my gravel driveway.
They approach the house frame I’ve erected, set up where Dad’s old house once stood. They place the machine on a slate slab I’ve set up by what I hope will be the front door. I uncap my electrical source as one of the mediums puts on ceramic-weave gloves to connect to the leads. I tamp down a flare of worry, reminding myself that I’d just recharged the lead-acid battery at the solar station and redid its plant latex cover a few days ago.
After the machine is humming, the women look directly at me, and my stomach drops. All of them have scars around their eyes. One has deep pink lines through her crow’s feet into her temples; one has swirls like the silt in a riverbed along her cheekbones.
A voice breaks into my reverie. “— even if the séance works, Rory, your father might not want to save your house,” the medium in front says. “The dead are in a restful place, and some don’t want to leave.”
I’ve blanked out again. I debate asking her to repeat herself, but I know the pros and cons. Entity houses are part of my job.
***
The Housing Authority was a thick stone building that squatted like a pale pig rooting in the rubble of less fortunate buildings. It was once a bank, but when everything fell apart, it was pressed into more important service.
The line on the ramp outside was always long. Folks would file in politely after I unlocked the door, reveling in the cool air while I climbed into the booth at the center of the marble atrium and raised the window grate.
“Welcome to the Unica Housing Authority. I’m Rory and I’ll be helping you today.” The crowd quieted as my voice echoed over their heads. “Please remember there are no perfect living situations anymore and we might not have a spot that suits you, but we’ll try our best. When you approach the window, please only share conditions for which you have a high tolerance. Our tallied conditions are listed on the wall to your right.”
I pointed at the metal plaque with its etched and braille contents. ‘Cold’, ‘hot’, ‘dust’, ‘mold’, and many others: too long to read aloud. I couldn’t help taking a second glance at an item partway down: “ancestors”. I tapped at the screen of my glass computer with a magnetic stylus.
“Okay, who’s first?”
The person who strode up to the counter wore a sky blue dress and a long black leather-looking jacket, both spattered with crusty yellow leopard-pattern splotches. I suppressed a wince. It’d been a decade since the bug killed anyone, but it still hurt to look at. I forced a smile.
“Hi there! Tolerances?”
“Dark, cold, and noisy,” the person replied.
I entered the tags and the computer returned two options. “Great. There’s a steel warehouse on Parker and a stone mill house at the end of Chancel. Neither slot includes bedding.”
The person nodded perfunctorily. “The mill house is good.”
I tapped the screen to mark the slot as ‘taken’, then grabbed a slate marker and scratched the address on it with a metal stylus. I slid the marker under the window. “There you go. Thank you and good luck.”
I watched as the person walked away, the crowd pulling away from them like oil from a soap drop. The leopard spot on the jacket’s left shoulder had already spread. A sign of plastic clothing. I wondered where they’d come from, what kind of privilege they had, to still own any wearable vinyl.
***
My memory has never been great. I forget my own age sometimes. But one thing I do remember is the first time I saw those creepy yellow splotches.
I had a dinner date with Dad, but his monthly doctor’s appointment was running late. I decided to hang out outside the house, swaying in the worn swing from my childhood. The rope was frayed against my palm and had worn grooves in the branch, but it was a comfortable seat. As I pushed myself in a lazy circle, the late afternoon sun speckled the leaves and I saw the spots: phlegm-yellow and tissue-thin inside, gray ring outside.
My phone rang as I was examining one of the mottled leaves.
“It’s your father.” The nurse’s voice didn’t even shake. “He collapsed during his checkup and now he’s unresponsive.”
‘Unresponsive’. What a horrible word.
***
I fell into my job at the Housing Authority because Dad’s house was one of the first hit in our town. We’d figured out how to detect and treat the first wave of the fungus we now call “the bug.” But it mutated fast, and the most resistant strain fed on our buildings instead of living beings. It ate away siding and air conditioning and window casings. Alcohol sprays, systemics, antimicrobials, and antifungals all failed, so I stopped at Town Hall to get the plans filed for Dad’s house. To see how bad it was going to get.
“We need to warn people to the south,” the woman at the desk blurted while I was making copies. “I think they’ll believe it more from people with personal experience. You have a nice voice. Want a job?”
I thought about Dad’s bay window falling out of its dissolving casing. How the siding looked like Swiss cheese a year after I’d buried him. My throat tightened and I nodded.
I’d only been working there for a month when I first heard about an entity house.
“Hi, I’m calling to tell you about the bug that is destroying homes,” I read from the script.
“Oh no, dear, I’ll be fine,” the person replied, with a breathless giggle.
“My apologies!” I looked at their house plans. “We have on record that your house has wood beams and studs.”
“That’s right?”
“If your house has any wood, plastic, vinyl, or acrylic, the bug will attack it,” I said. “I can describe–”
“It’s okay, dear,” they interrupted. “Gramma took care of it.”
My heart leapt. Maybe there’s a solution. “What did your grandmother do?”
“She came back.” They giggled again. “Oh, she’s asking for her show. Gotta go.”
My phone clicked. They’d hung up.
Last I checked, the house was still standing, no leopard-spot marks in sight. They’ve also been generous. Filed four sleep slots with us. Tenants report that Gramma is noisy at 2 AM and is particular about kitchen cleanliness, to the point where she’ll wake them up with a frigid touch if they leave a mess. Otherwise, she doesn’t act like a ghost at all.
We’ve confirmed twelve entity houses so far. We’ve also heard other stories – folks who summoned a family member to help, only to have their relative’s ghost refuse and go back where they came from. It sounded like it hurt, to lose them all over again.
***
The head medium bows at me. “Do you have the ashes?”
I slide the silver urn from behind the new door jamb. I hold my breath as I break the seal on the urn and grab a pinch of ashes.
She points at the urn. “That should come as well.”
“Really?” I debate whether to return the ashes.
“He will be the fourth for the séance.”
“Oh.” I cradle the urn in my left arm. “Where should I put…”
I can’t bring myself to say ‘him’ or ‘it’.
The head medium gestures. “There, towards the west. The departed sit at the setting sun. You sit at the north, our guiding star.”
I place the urn where she indicated. Up close the machine purrs like a satisfied feline.
“Kasira, you sit at the east, the rising, and…” She cocks her head, as if listening. “Yes, Erius, you take the south, the brightening.”
The mediums, both young-looking and oddly aged, seat themselves. Kasira’s scars are jagged scores like broken toffee in the hollows of her eyes. Erius bears four white-silver furrows, two down each cheek.
“We do not control those we call,” the medium says. “Ancestors speak to us only if they wish to. We take these ashes to communicate that we are your approved emissary to the dead.”
I sprinkle the pinch of ashes into Kasira’s cupped hand. She presses a thumb into them and strokes her thumb across her forehead. She passes the ashes to Erius, who repeats the gesture, then shakes the remaining ashes into a metal cup at the center of the machine. They both grasp one of the metal dowels on the lachrymatorium with their left hand. The rest of the women back down the driveway.
“Where are they going?” I whisper to Kasira.
“This is no longer their place.” She winks, her broken-toffee scars bunching. “Now it’s up to us.”
***
“Okay, who’s next?”
The person wore an algae tunic and mycelium-leather clogs, their black hair short-cropped, small brown eyes glaring at me.
“Thank you for waiting. Tolerances?”
“Pollen,” they replied.
“Nothing else?”
“Why?” They sneered. “Where do you live?”
I hid a sigh. “My tolerances are dark, stuffy, and hard, so I’m in a shipping container park. I share my crate with three others.” Their brow furrowed, so I modulated my voice towards the perky. “My bedding is a myco mat. If you’re interested, there are slots left in my park.”
They deflated, the sneer replaced by a disappointed twist of lips. “I see. I’d be okay with bugs, steps, and height.”
“Fantastic!” I tapped it in. “Two treehouses have slots available. They have woven live-branch floors, leaf beds, and mycelium tarps in case of rain. One has a sunset view and one has a living vine wall to block wind from the south. It includes morning glories.”
Their eyes widened and I caught a glimpse of a grin. “Ooh, a vine wall! I’ll take that one.”
I smiled as I passed over the slate marker. It was rare to please someone in this job. I rubbed the belt buckle in my pocket and reminded myself to mark this moment down later.
***
Kate usually let me stay past closing to use the glass computer in the back office. I’d jot down things we’ve lost. Sometimes simple pleasures, like books and stuffed animals. Sometimes things I’ve never used, like Kevlar and mosquito netting. Sometimes I’d even mark down people who I’d briefly forgotten.
Memory has always been a problem for me. Doctors had differing theories why. Maybe the trauma of losing my mom so early;. Possibly an attention disorder. All I knew was that I’d never been good with names or dates. But it wasn’t until Dad was gone that I realized how much I was forgetting.
When I arrived at the hospital, he was already dead. They gave me a bag of his things. Plaid shirt, canvas pants, steel watch, leather belt. A few weeks after he died, the leather belt grew a tiny leopard spot. I’d given the belt to Dad for Father’s Day. I realized I didn’t remember buying it, I didn’t remember him opening it, but I remembered him putting it on. I couldn’t remember the sound of his voice, but I remembered what he said: “It fits! How did you know my belt size, Roribell?”
“I didn’t, Dad.” I held out my arms in an ellipse. “This is how big you are when I hug you. So that’s how big the belt needed to be.”
I remembered his eyes filling with tears. He’d kissed the top of my head as I hugged him again, feeling his stomach hitching in quiet sobs.
“I keep forgetting how short you are,” he’d whispered, making me laugh.
“And how long your legs are,” I’d teased.
We stayed in the hug for ten minutes.
I thought. I didn’t know for sure.
I did remember screaming over the leather as the bug ate it, that memory turning to shreds, then dust. I also remembered crying with relief when the gold-toned brass buckle remained intact, and how well it fit in my pocket.
***
Kasira leans towards me. “Remind us how to say your father’s name?”
“Niven, like given, and Seinn like sine wave.”
The ash-prints on the mediums’ foreheads glow with a blue-gray iridescence as the machine sparks and Erius speaks.
“I call upon the spirit of Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”
A breeze kicks up.
Kasira repeats it. “I call upon Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”
Nothing happens. Kasira glances at Erius.
“You feel anything?”
“Not enough juice,” Erius replies.
I shrink under their gaze.
***
“Thank you for waiting. Tolerances?”
“Ancestors,” the frail person at the window replied. Their watery eyes were swollen and the ridges of their nostrils were chapped. The bones of old leaves peeked out from under their lank brown hair.
I raised my eyebrows. “Ancestors? Nothing else?”
Their gaze didn’t waver.
“Look.” I lowered my voice. “There aren’t many real entity houses right now. It takes a family loss and a very generous ancestor to make one. People claim they have a haunting, but the bug always gets them. You should choose something else.”
The person shook their head. “I’m allergic to a thousand things. It’s too cold for me in here and too hot out there. Anything hard, bright, or noisy hurts. Right now I’m in a sleep ditch off the freeway because it’s better than anything else.” They shrugged. “So unless you have a tolerance I haven’t heard of yet, ‘ancestors’ is it.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I can add you to the waiting list but it’s fairly long.”
They pulled a square aluminum pager from their pocket. I scanned it and added the ID to the list, and they turned away from the booth, shoulders slumped.
I thought about the thing I was building, and I crossed my fingers and bumped their ID to the top before calling the next person up.
***
After Mom died, Dad took me along to his construction sites, first showing me how to sort tools, then how to lay bricks, then on to more complicated things. Everything he’d taught me was clear in my mind, even after everything else I’d forgotten.
When I started the house frame, I decided to take as many shortcuts as I could. No walls, no planing. The bug took months to hit new-cut wood, so I had some time, but not much. If the séance worked, the house would stand. If the séance didn’t work, it would fall anyway.
The doorway was last. Dad was always good with doors. I sawed the branch off the maple where my swing had once hung. The living branch still had grooves in it from the rope so I was extra cautious cutting it, preserving those grooves.
I sobbed while taking the bark off the branch. Wept like I was sacrificing one of the few memories I still had.
I was still working on it, sanding the jamb and hammering in the nail where the bell would go, when the mediums arrived.
***
Kasira reaches out to me. I hesitate, glancing at the machine.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she promises.
I slide my fingers into her hand, surprised at its warmth. Kasira squeezes my palm.
“Why have you asked us here today?”
“I want a better place to live,” I murmur. “I’m tired of my container.”
Erius shakes her head. “You could have built a steel structure.”
Kasira clasps my hand more tightly. “Why wood? Why here?”
A muscle in the side of my throat tightens, sending a sharp ache down into my collarbone. “I miss my dad. He was a woodworker. He built the house that used to be here, but the bug ate it.”
Erius scoots towards me. “But why did you choose something so fragile?”
“For… for memory.”
“Memory?” Kasira tilts her head. “Can you tell us more about that?”
I try not to sniffle. “The bug took all the furniture he built. It took everything he built. Those were supposed to be heirlooms. Now it’s all gone, so it’s like he’s all gone.”
“Why would he be gone? Doesn’t he live in your memories?” Kasira rubs her thumb over my knuckle. “Doesn’t everyone you’ve loved?”
I struggle to breathe. They’re watching me expectantly. Waiting for me to agree. I glance back at the doorway. Something clenches painfully inside my chest, and I can’t hold it anymore.
“No, that’s the problem!” Tears scald my cheeks like steam. “I should remember more, but I don’t. I don’t remember him on my sixteenth birthday. I don’t remember him at my college graduation. I don’t remember our last Christmas.” My throat spasms. “Oh god, and it’s too late! It’s too late to make any more memories with him! If I was smart, I would have written everything down. I would have made sure I’d never forget. But I’m not smart, I’m a selfish jerk, I’m a terrible daughter. I thought I had more time. I thought I had more time.”
I try to pull free from Kasira to cover my face as I cry, but she holds fast, a deathly stillness in her fingers. “There it is,” she whispers. “There’s the juice. That’s the grief he needs.”
The machine’s hum intensifies, vibrating in my skin. Electricity spits as the bulbs turn on. I squint, my tears cracking the world into rainbows, as Kasira and Erius chant together.
“We call upon the spirit of Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”
A white mist coagulates above the machine. The mediums continue. “Your daughter Rorius awaits you, Niven. If you consent, make yourself known!”
Something sizzles. I smell peanut butter and pepper – right, Dad’s lunches, on that wheat bread he loved. I’d forgotten them.
Then I hear a voice.
Roribell…
My stomach jumps. It’s been years, but I recognize it. Even though I couldn’t recall the sound of his voice, I recognize the sound.
I recognize it.
The smell. The sound. The memories were always there, deep in my gut. Exactly like the belt. Knowing his size not because it was in my brain, but because I’d hugged him so often my body knew it by heart.
Whatever my brain did or didn’t keep, the rest of my body recorded it all.
My shoulders wrench with sobs of relief as Kasira squeezes my hand. “Niven Seinn, will you share your afterlife on this plane, within the house your child has built, until such time as she departs?”
Do you need me, Roribell?
“I…” I stop. Am I being a terrible daughter again? Is it cruel to want him to stay with me? To leave the peaceful rest he deserves?
I flash on the person with the watery eyes. Their desperation. And how many other people might be in the same place.
I might not need him, but other people do.
“We all do. Please,” I manage, vocal cords tight with choked-back grief.
Then I’ll stay…
Kasira and Erius shriek as lightning crackles around the machine, then leaps into the lintel of the door with a sound like fireworks. Kasira clenches my hand hard enough to crack my knuckles before she lets go.
“Bless you, Niven, for your sacrifice. When Rory departs, one of us shall return to release you,” Erius gasps.
The machine’s hum fades. A wisp of smoke rises from Kasira’s face, a trickle of bloody pus seeping from a broken spot under her left eye.
“Shit!” I reach towards her. “Are you okay?”
She pats my hand, then blots the pus on her cheek with a graceful lift of her shoulder. “It hurts, but scars are remembrance.” She smiles. “Most people hide their scars, but for us, it’s an honor to bear this memory.”
As she and Erius undo the leads, Kasira winks at me and pantomimes crying. I rub my eyes by instinct, then jump at a sting under my right eye. A smear of blood pinkens the side of my index finger.
A wound, to turn into a scar. For remembrance.
I grin despite myself. Of course. Scars are the ghosts of past injuries, haunting our skin. It would keep my memory close to the surface, so that I’ll never forget.
I don’t know what my scar will look like, but I don’t care. It’ll remind me, every day, whether from other people’s reactions or from seeing my face in a reflection, that my memories live within me.
That my dad was never gone.
I lean on the maple door jamb and watch them gather up the machine and leave, their robes fading into the air as twilight deepens.
I like your house, Roribell.
I sigh. “Thank you, Daddy.”
I hug the jamb for at least ten minutes, then pluck the belt buckle from my pocket. I hang it on the nail that marks where the bell will go, and step under the lightning-struck lintel to start the walls.
Author’s Note: This story came to me when I was processing several different kinds of loss at once. I’d gone to a memorial during the second year of the pandemic and as people recounted stories about the deceased, I realized that not only had I lost the person’s presence, I’d lost memories of them too. That memorial, plus the loss of access to the world around me, led me to an internal quest that I externalized to create Rory’s. (Many thanks to Cat Rambo for the title.)
Risa Wolf is a multi-gendered water elemental disguised as an ink-stained lycanthrope. (Don’t tell their spouse or their dogs; the disguise is working.) They come from the Burned-Over District in New York State, and they imagine houses for book-ghosts for a living. Their writing can be found in places like Apex, Clarkesworld, and Cast of Wonders. Visit them at killerpuppytails.com, on Mastodon at @killerpuppytails, or BlueSky at @risawolf.bsky.social.
Hello! I’m here to give an update on the general submission window where we were taking submissions from July 17-31. We received 1451 stories for the submission window. The first round is complete, so everyone should have received an initial response of either a rejection or a hold notice. If you haven’t received one, check your spam folder, you can check your status on the submission site if you have your confirmation name, otherwise you can query us immediately.
Normally I announce the story lineup all at once with all the months, but we are running a little later than I had hoped, and so I’m slipping in the first story announcement right here:
The November story will be: In the Shelter of Ghosts by Risa Wolf
We have a couple other acceptances in hand, and we are having discussions right now to finalize the rest of the list.
On a related note, because we are running a little later than we had originally planned, we are publishing one story a month for a couple months to connect the schedule up. But we’re planning to return to our usual cadence of two stories a month at that point.
In Loving Memory of Mikko Steffen Born November 1, 2007 Adopted May 24, 2008 Died May 8, 2023
This is the story of a dog who has been a part of our family for fifteen years and connected all of the other dogs we’ve ever had. This is the story of a miracle dog who beat the odds over and over again. This is the story of Mikko the white poodle.
Mikko’s Life
Bringing Him Home
At the time we adopted Mikko, we had just moved into our first house after living in a series of apartments. We had our first dog, Aria, and we were looking for another dog to be a playmate for Aria in the wide open spaces of our new home that we hadn’t filled with much furniture yet.
Heather had fond memories of the poodles she had when she was a kid so she wanted another poodle. She found Picket Fence Poodles, a poodle rescue organization that was a mid-length drive away. Listed on their site was “Perry”. For this adoption, it required people with poodle experience and people who were willing to adopt a dog with special needs, because he was born with luxating patellas, where his kneecaps are not fixed in place the way they should be.
We set up a meet and greet with Picket Fence Poodles to meet him, with just the two of us going to meet him at the home of the rescue organization. We had a great time playing with him, we talked about his leg issues, talked about his care, and we decided to take him home.
He had been born at a poodle breeder. Because of his legs, he was unable to walk when puppies normally learn to walk. They had planned to euthanize him, but he was so cute they kept putting it off and carried him around and then, surprise, he actually started walking on his own! He managed to get enough strength in his legs that he was still able to learn to walk. So at that point they gave him over to the rescue organization. They warned us that he would never be able to jump or to climb stairs, but of course that didn’t matter to us.
We decided we didn’t like the name “Perry” (this was before the days of Perry the Platypus or we might have kept it) and he didn’t respond to the name yet anyway. We named him “Mikko” after Mikko Koivu who was a long-running player on the local NHL hockey team The Minnesota Wild.
We brought him home and introduced him to Aria, and they became best friends and playmates. Of course, there was plenty of conflict. Aria was the more dominant of the two, but Mikko didn’t want to up on that, so he would try to boss her around.
Nicknames
So many variations on the name, we would call him Mako, Mikko Mako, Makiko, Meeky, Squeako, Beako, Squabeako, Mr. Mikko, Magical Mikko, and so many variations of each.
What Made Him Special
Determined
Aria was still pretty young at the time too but Mikko never had enough playtime. They would chase and play and wrestle and playfight, and then Aria would jump up to the back of the couch and watch smugly with the terrain advantage while he barked from the floor and tried to reach her. He would alternate between putting his front paws on the couch and doing tiny little hops that were nowhere near high enough, to taking a running jump from four feet away which he landed on the ground before he reached the couch.
This went on and on for days and weeks and finally he managed to jump up onto the couch and even surprised himself, and then when he jumped back down he couldn’t figure out how to get back up again, though he did eventually figure it out.
Still, the stairs were an obstacle. Aria could run down or up the stairs without any problem and he would get so mad if she left him behind, so she would go up or down and then taunt him and he wanted to do the stairs so badly because he couldn’t let he just gloat like that. We taught him to go up stairs first, by putting him one stair down and coaxing him up while we stood below to catch him if he slipped. Then two stairs, then three, and soon he was confident enough he could go up the whole flight.
At the time, we watched TV on cable and the only cable jack was downstairs, so we would watch TV in the basement. This worked fine when Mikko couldn’t take the stairs, but once he learned to go up but not down then he would decide to go upstairs and then would sit at the top of the stairs and bark for someone to carry him down. So, yes, we did eventually teach him to go downstairs too.
From the start, he defied expectations from sheer determination.
Bossy
From when he was young he tried to be the most dominant dog in the house. Which really didn’t work with Aria, but he could get away with bossing Timmy around when he was there, especially as Timmy got older and confused Mikko would try to coach him and say “don’t do that, you’re being weird” when Timmy would wander or get stuck in a corner.
His determination was not always a positive trait, even to himself. For some reason, he would sometimes get very angry if he was left in a kennel with a bowl of water, and he would furiously try to bury it with his nose, sometimes until his snout was bloody from pushing. When he was older and was having some difficulty maintaining his appetite he sometimes did the same with food left for him, but then sometimes he would try to bury it for a while, then he would eat some, then he would try to bury it again.
He would always bark at leaves blowing in the wind as if they had offended him personally, and if he happened to catch a tailwind he would look as if he thought someone was blowing on his butt.
Compassionate
If someone cried he would always go to them and want to be held and lick their tears away.
If Aria got locked in a closet by accident as she often did when she followed someone in there, then Mikko would found out where she was and would come get someone to come get her out, and would keep giving significant looks at the closet door until someone let her out.
Unusual
Probably some of this came from his luxating patellas, but Mikko had some weird postures. Mikko loved pillows and beds, but he tended to never lie in them all the way, always draping himself across the edge of the bed with half his body outside of his bed. When he was young he also liked to squeeze into tiny dog beds with Aria. He’s the only dog I’ve seen who would kneel with one or both legs instead of always sitting on his butt (which prompted people who didn’t know him to think he was going to pee). And when he laid down he would like to lay with his legs splayed out that we liked to call a “Mikko-skin rug”. He was also never able to pee with one leg lifted like most male dogs do.
When you brought him to bed at night and he was getting settled in, he would often do a sort of superhero stretch where he laid on his back and stretched one foreleg away in front of his face.
Friendly
Besides making immediate friends with Aria, and with Timmy who became our third Musketeer, when he was younger, Mikko would always be the greeter and ambassador of the group. When we walked the dogs, or when we had visitors, he would always be the first one to meet the new dog, because he never saw a dog he didn’t want to play with.
Unfortunately he gradually lost much of this trait of being able to immediately click with new dogs, perhaps due to increasing arthritis and other health issues, though he remained playful with people and his dog roommates for most of his life.
One time when he was young we set a big upright mirror down on the ground, the upper portion of a furniture hutch. Mikko saw his reflection and was obsessed with it, barking and pawing at his reflection and trying to get it to play with him, rearing up on his hind legs and pawing at it to try to reach the other dog, looking on the other side of the mirror and surprised he couldn’t find it there.
Communication
For barking, Mikko had one volume: loud, and his barks were very animated. More so than other dogs, he would throw his head back like the recoil of a cannon as he fired each loud bark into the world. Some of our other dogs we could teach to bark quietly on command, with a “say please” they would give a quiet talking-level bark. We taught Mikko to do this too, but with him it was either “full volume” or “mute”. When he was on mute, he would make the full head-throwing-back motion of a bark, but make no vocal sound whatsoever, just the soft “click” of his teeth.
When he wanted something, he would stand right next to you and look up with his gigantic eyes, and then lift one paw and scratch softly at your leg–scratchscratchscratch and then look again. He would alternate this with his own unique vocalizations that were a variation on a whine, but would sound like “hoot hoot hoot” like a monkey.
He could answer the question “Where’s Heather?” (or other member’s of the household). If you asked that, he would recognize which member of the household and would either find that person in the same room and point at them like a hunting dog with one front leg raised and head pointed, or would go find them in a different room. Even if the person was hiding he would keep at it until he found them.
If you took him out to use the lawn, sometimes he would pee and then head back for the house. But then if you asked him “Mikko, do you need to poop?” he would actually stop, seem to consider it, and sometimes he would head back to the lawn to poop. Like “oh yeah, thanks for reminding me.”.
Like most dogs he would wag his tail when he was happy, but he also had a very distinct tail wag when he was nervous about something. Instead of wagging at a constant rate he would wagwagwagwag three or four times very quickly and then pause, and then wagwagwagwag again.
When he was young he would love to have training sessions where he would learn to sit and lie down and try to learn other tricks. He was great at “spin left”, if you said that with some treats in your hand he would spin and spin and spin and spin. Surprisingly, he never ever did get the hang of “spin right”. You would try to lead him around that way and he just seemed to find it perplexing.
Although he had sporadic digestive issues for much of his life, he was usually pretty good about getting us some warning. Sometimes I would wake up to the hork-hork-hork sound of him preparing to vomit, and sometimes I could wake up fast enough to pick him up and carry him to the bathtub for easier cleaning. Sometimes.
Woolly
He had the most beautiful fluffy white fur, that he looked like a little lamb, and was so soft. Like any poodle, he absolutely needed to be clipped periodically, because poodles don’t shed, their hair just keeps growing. When he came back from the groomer his fur would always have been freshly washed and dried and brushed so his fur was just like touching pure fuzz. As he went between groomings his hair would get longer and would separate into big spiral shapes and get heavy and start drooping, which was an easy way to know it was time to get the dogs groomed again.
We joked that we should shear him and sell the fur to make Swiffer sweepers, because the fur was extremely absorbent. If we walked him on a dirt trail his legs would turn almost black up to the knees. If I didn’t pick up the grass clippings after I mowed, he would come back inside with green sleeves.
People Person
Besides chasing and wrestling with the other dogs, he loved interacting with people however he could. If anyone laid on the floor, he would always immediately go over to them and get comfortable on their belly or back. We have never had another dog who liked lying on people so much.
He also liked to sit behind people’s necks on the couch, and loved to be carried behind people’s necks with his front on one shoulder and his back on the other.
He was the most trusting dog we’ve ever had for having his belly up. He wouldn’t even mind being held in your arms with his belly up. In fact, when he was very comfortable he would be a limp noodle with his neck dangling loosely.
He was always a playful nibbler. If you held a hand out to him he would licklicklick your finger, and then put your finger in his mouth and give a very gentle squeeze with his teeth, licklicklick chew chew, licklicklick chew chew, the same pattern over and over again.
Toys
He loved toys. He was a big fan of playing fetch, he would bring toys over and over if you kept throwing them, and he was pretty good at catching them in mid-air. Our living is carpeted and then we have a rug by the front door on hardwood–if you threw a toy over there he would hop over the wood section between them like a little deer.
He had a habit of dismembering stuffed animal dog toys and playing with the limbs. Among his favorite toys were a zebra leg, a crab leg, and a monkey paw (we of course trained him not to make any wishes on it).
He loved to pull the fuzz off of plush toys, and would just sit there and rip, rip, rip. And if you were like “Mikko, have you been defuzzing” and he would look up at you with his giant innocent eyes and a green or purple goatee of fuzz. If anyone left any toilet paper or tissue where he could reach it he would shred it everywhere.
He loved bones too, but what he loved more than bones is putting a bone ON a toy or vice versa, and chewing both of them at the same time.
Treat balls were one of his favorite things (plastic balls filled with treats where some would dump out randomly if they rolled it around enough). He was the only one who could figure out how to pick them up–they were too big for our digs to fit the whole ball in their mouth, but there is a little opening where the treats come out and Mikko was clever enough to get a couple teeth in there enough to grip. He would play with that thing for a long time.
Walks
He always loved walks, and when he was young he would always make the absolute most of them, easily getting twice the steps of anyone else on the walk, because he would walk to the full extent of the leash allowed to him, and then he would zigzag to the far left, to the far right and back and forth.
One of his favorite things was sniffing the white splats of bird poop, he would always stop to smell every single one, even if there were a bunch of them he would thoroughly work through them. If there were any white chalk or white paint markings on a walking path he would always investigate those too, and was probably disappointed at the lack of fecal aroma.
Fears
Many dogs are afraid of thunder or lightning. Mikko never was much bothered by it, even when other dogs were trying to hide from the storm he would curl up and nap. But he was often afraid if someone passed gas, even if that someone was him, he would look back at his butt like someone snuck up behind him. And he was very afraid when someone started crafting, perhaps because of the noises that holepunchers or other crafting tools make. We liked to joke that his only weakness was farts and crafts.
With Others
With Aria
When we first got Mikko, Aria was the only other dog. They were instant friends, though there was plenty of conflict. They fought over food and bones but were pretty much always ready to play with each other, or go for a walk, or bark at the door and Mikko loved to stand on his hind legs at the door and paw with both front legs like he was trying to dig through the door.
They were always learning from each other. When Aria was an only dog she would always try to save treats for later by going behind a piece of furniture and “burying” the treat in the carpet by placing it gently on the carpet and pushing with her nose like she was pushing dirt over the top. She learned not to do that pretty quick when Mikko would follow along behind it and immediately eat it.
In most situations he wasn’t as smart as Aria, but if he was sufficiently motivated he could be very clever. He would love to taunt her if he had a bone, he would hold it sticking out of the side of his mouth and walk up to her, and if she grabbed for it he would spin around to get it out of her reach. He also would find ways to draw her away from a bone she was chewing. They both loved to bark at the front door when pedestrians or animals were outside, so if she had a bone he would sometimes go bark at the front door like there was something out there, and then when she joined him, he would loop around behind her and grab her bone. She learned the trick pretty quick and would try it on him, but he was too clever for that, he would run to the door but he would remember to grab the bone first.
They loved to chase each other so much. We had a couch downstairs in a huge area without much else around it, and they would chase each other around and around until you couldn’t tell who was chasing who. She was definitely the stronger of the two and on a straightaway she could definitely outsprint him. But she also had more momentum because of her greater mass. So he could take sharp ninety degree turns at his top speed while she would swing wide into a wider oval shape as she tried to make the turn and they would end up being pretty evenly matched.
With Timmy
We adopted Timmy within the first year that we had Mikko, so he completed the Three Musketeers that were all together for four years. When Timmy and Mikko were both young they would love to play together and wrestle too, both of them rearing up on their hind legs and grappling with each other. Both of them lived to a very old age, so it’s always still a little surprising to look at those early videos and see how spry and energetic they both were.
With Violet
In December 2012, when Aria passed away unexpectedly at only age 5, Mikko was distraught. His usually high energy level went way down and he didn’t want to do anything but sleep. We adopted Violet in a relatively short time after that, just before Christmas travel, to try to help him through that with a new extra companion. Violet and Mikko took well to each other immeidately. Theywould play-bow and like to chase each other around. As Mikko got older, his arthritis and other conditions meant he got a less playful so Violet had to find her playtime elsewhere, but they got along most of the time. Mikko was always pretty bossy, and Violet was usually happy to be a follower.
They lived together for almost ten years, for almost two-thirds of his life.
With Michael
We adopted Michael after Timmy passed away in 2018, and Michael lived with Mikko for the last five years of Mikko’s life. By that time, Mikko was usually not super big at playing with other dogs, though occasionally we could coax them to play tug of war briefly, more likely they would both play fetch with one person alongside each other. Otherwise they generally got along as long as someone playing fetch with Michael didn’t throw the toy over Mikko so that Michael would bowl over him.
With Mabel
Mabel joined the family when Violet passed away and Mikko was already quite old. Between his different health problems he had a lot less patience in general and was no longer the greet and ambassador he used to be. But he was very patient with Mabel the big overbearing lumbering giant.
He was always very good with Mabel, sort of a father figure and she adored him from the moment she met him. If he was doing something she always wanted to be right there doing it with him. As he got older and his health complications got worse, we found we needed to start watching them very closely because sometimes her infatuation would manifest in unhelpful/unhealthy ways where if he fell down she would try to jump on top of him (and with him being so old and weak and her outweighing him by a significant margin), and one time even bit him pretty hard though since she didn’t have any teeth no permanent harm was done.
With Cooper
When Cooper and Mikko were both young, they would love to play and wrestle and roughhouse with each other. Cooper lost the knack for it, but they still got along pretty well most of the time. Though they didn’t live together they would see each other at least a few times a year, and both knew each other for almost fourteen years together.
With the Cat-In-Laws
Mikko, as noted elsewhere in this memorial, was always a big barker, and the cats were among his favorite bark-targets and any cat that would run away from him would get a steady barking and chase, though I don’t think he would honestly have had any idea what to do with a cat if he caught one.
With the Kid
The kid and Mikko when the kid was young would both excite and sometimes terrify each other. Mikko would chase the kid as the kid was toddling around and the kid would squeal and giggle and run away.
As Mikko got older and started slowing down, the kid was also getting older and toning down the uncontrollable toddler energy, and eventually Mikko learned to trust the kid and would even let the kid hold him and pet him. Some of our professional family photos he would take while Ian held him to keep him still.
Medical Adventures On the Way
Mikko and Violet had a common desire to chew small plastic objects, which was very unfortunate when the kid was very young and would leave small plastic objects everywhere. Pacifiers were a particular favorite, but any plastic toy would do. Sometimes we find part of a chewed-up toy and we wouldn’t know whether Mikko or Violet ate it and we would have to bring both of them to the vet to induce vomiting. He also ate some leaves of a plant that we found out was toxic and had to take him in for that.
Mikko had problems with smegma buildup throughout most of his life. I won’t go into details here, but if you decide to do a search for the word, you probably want to leave the image search off until you read what it is.
In the last couple years of his life, we started to notice he would get a “bubble butt” sometimes, where he would have a section near his butt that was literally like a little inflated balloon. It didn’t seem to bother him, and with a little pressure it could be pushed into his body. It turned out that this was a prolapsed bladder. As he aged he was losing quite a bit of muscle mass, and so there was more of a gap in his pelvic area where muscles would normally be and his bladder could sneak out through there. The vet said a surgery was available where they would try to fix the bladder in place and suture some of the muscles together so there was no space for it to sneak through. We were fully planning on doing this, when he got an intestinal bleed from something unrelated and had to delay it due to not wanting to anesthetize him while he had another condition. By the time we got all that sorted out, he was struggling with other health problems again and we decided to put it off. It was some risk to do so, because if his bladder became strangulated it might have meant extreme pain and a visit to the emergency room, but doing the surgery would also have been quite risky at that point. He continued to have the bubble butt for the rest of his life, but it never really seemed to bother him, and didn’t escalate.
One time fell and managed to jam his tail on landing and he couldn’t wag it at all for a while, and he wagged his tail so much generally this was very difficult for him.
One time when we had a guest over at our house and we were working on putting the dogs in a separate room, Mikko tried to sprint out to the living room to see them and got deflected just enough by someone’s leg to run full speed into a doorframe and knocked a tooth loose in the front of his jaw.
The Sad Part
In 2018, when he was having some problems with urination we took him to the vet to get him checked out, to see if there was crystals in his urine, that sort of thing. As part of that, the vet did a sonogram and concluded that he had a tumor in his bladder and that vet pretty much said that we should say our goodbyes because we had between weeks and months to be with him whether or not we started cancer treatment. He was still generally very healthy and we didn’t want to give up on him so we were considering whether for a dog cancer treatment would affect his quality of life too much, but before we made any major decision we got a second opinion and they couldn’t find any sign of a tumor, so the other vet’s original diagnosis seemed to be based on one image and maybe there was a weird angle or something. We decided not to move forward with cancer treatment, given that there was no clear sign, and given that he lived five years longer after that and no sign of a tumor presented itself, in retrospect it must have been an incorrect diagnosis. This didn’t actually play into his end of life health issues in any way, but I put it in this section because it was scary and sad anyway.
In September 2020, he had a strange and scary episode where he started acting dizzy, fell over, and then was breathing fast and heavy after that. Fast and heavy breathing can be a sign of serious urgent issues and can indicate pain among other things, so we took him in right away. He had had a heart murmur for years before that, and they said that the issue was that he was going into congestive heart failure where the heart enlarges from gathering too much fluid, we were already familiar with this from when Timmy went through it. So they sent us home with a diuretic to try to pull some of the fluid out of his lungs. Over the next twenty-four hours this didn’t help at all, and at times was up to 95 breaths per minute resting which is much higher than it should be. We ended up taking him to the emergency room and they found that there was fluid outside of his lungs pressing on his lungs and making it hard to breathe. He was diagnosed with protein-losing enteropathy (PLE), a digestive issue which causes albumen protein to leak, which pulls water out into the abdomen and causes other issues. They put him on a special low-fat diet after that, and we had to be very careful what kinds of foods and treats that we gave him, because going off-diet could send his health plummeting again.
He had always had irritable bowels, and during this time we struggled with further digestive symptoms like colitis, and had to constantly watch him for bouts of foul-smelling strange-looking diarrhea, though much of the time he was fine. He went on like that for quite some time, having good health most of the time on this diet and with an increasing set of medications to help with his heart and his PLE, and with periodic checkups with the cardiologist and internal medicine to adjust his medications now and then, as we watched his albumen very closely to make sure it didn’t go too far. He sometimes had bouts of digestive issues but was manageable most of the time.
In October 2022, he started having some weird violent flinching reactions to movement or to light. We thought it might have been due to him gradually losing his eyesight as his eyes clouded over. And then he had the scariest medical episode of his life thus far. He was just coming in from using the lawn, and he seemed to freeze up like a statue, all his legs going rigid. I was getting the leash off of him and he just tipped over onto his side as I called for Heather who was across the room. She came and picked him up and he was as stiff as a board with his legs and neck outstretched. We tried to comfort him with words and touch as best we could, though we couldn’t tell if he could hear us. He stayed like that for maybe thirty seconds and then suddenly he went as limp as a rag doll, with his head lolling down at an unnatural angle.
We really thought he was dead, and we were frantically telling him we loved him just in case, and he started to come awake, very groggy and confused. We of course rushed him to the emergency room and spent a long night there. At first they told us that it couldn’t have been a seizure, because nothing seemed to indicate a cause. But some of his digestive conditions make some tests give weird results, so they didn’t realize at first that he had dangerously low calcium, which was probably what caused the seizure. So we added more medicines to his daily regimen to manage his calcium levels and that stabilized him for quite some time.
Every month we were surprised but blessed that he was still with us and we cherished our time with him. We were both working from home, which did make it easier, because we could take him into one of our offices with us, and could usually rush him outside if he needed it. No more having to put him a kennel during the workday.
As time went on in those last months, he had more difficulty with appetite, more difficulty with vision, and controlling his bowel movements, and loss of muscle mass, and slept more and more. He had bad days pretty more and more often and we started to have conversations about when we would have to say our final goodbyes. We had to rotate between foods to try to tempt him into eating, but we were limited in our options because of the PLE.
We found that we could never leave him alone with Mabel in that last stretch because although she seemed to adore him, sometimes if he was acting strange like stumbling or struggling to get up she would react incongruously and either jump on him, or even one time she bit him though she had no teeth. We’re still not sure if she was just trying to help somehow, or if this was some kind of instinctual reaction or what.
The spring came late in 2023, but when the weather was nice enough we would still take him for walks, but we would take him in a stroller while we walked the other dogs on leashes, as he still enjoyed the fresh air and the sights.
We gave him a hair clipping in the spring with the help of Heather’s mom, because we couldn’t send him to the groomer anymore with all his conditions and he had gotten quite shaggy. It took three of us to do it, because he was getting pretty cranky about it at that time and snapped at the clippers a lot.
As May arrived, he was barely anything but skin and bones–when we had to give him a bath after a digestive issue, and all the fur clung to his skin, his ribs and other bones protruded very prominently.
He started to have trouble standing and walking for any period of time. We would feed him by hand in a bed, and when we took him outside we would stand him up and he could manage it after a couple tries and then we would carry him back inside. He got very sensitive about his head, which he normally would like to be pet, but if anyone pet him on the head in the last few days he would snarl.
He stopped eating his prescription food entirely and we had talks hourly about what we could do, what we could try, what other kinds of simple non-fatty foods we could try to feed him, and whether we needed to make the difficult decision yet. Finally, we decided, with him not eating anything and struggling to take care of his basic needs, we needed to make the tough call. We decided we would give him a chance to eat some junk food as a last hurrah, so on the last day he got to eat Arby’s roast beef, hamburger, chicken nuggets, and some other things that we normally could not allow him to eat.
The last week or so of his life, he could get very sensitive about being touched in certain contexts and he would snarl to try to get his space. Which, if he needs space, that’s fine, but it did make nights difficult because the dogs sleep in the bed and any slight movement would set him off. But it all worked out much better when we decided to put an open-topped soft-sided kennel by our bed, with a dog bed and a blanket inside it. That way he could have his space without being bumped, and we could know that he was safe and not wandering the house, and nearby so we could help him if he needed it. The last night with us, even though he was having trouble walking and didn’t seem to always know where he was, he was still diligent about informing us when he needed to go out, he reached the side of the kennel and clawed it with his paw so it made a zipzipzip sound and woke me up so I could take him out.
We used a home service, the first time we have done it that way instead of doing it in a veterinary setting.. After work we got him to the park for a last walk in the stroller before the vet came to our home, gave him special snacks. He passed away with the three of us holding his feet and petting him gently (but not on the head). After the first medication seemed to have him conked out, Heather patted him on the head and he still had some fight in him then because he snapped at it. But soon he slipped away peacefully, with his family at his side.
What Came After
Mabel missed him fiercely, looking around the house for him wondering where he was. Her general anxiety seemed to be worse. If she hears Michael yowling somewhere , then she has been freaking out trying to get to wherever he is. Maybe she worried that Mikko’s disappearance is not the last. We watched some old videos of Mikko; in the ones where Mikko barks she recognizes his voice and looks around for him.
Heather always looks for signs after a dog passes that the dog is coming back to visit. When Violet passed, she saw three cardinals in a group (one for each dog we had lost), so she was watching for cardinals again after Mikko passed. She didn’t see more than two cardinals the day after he passed, but she did find Mikko’s zebra leg, crab leg, and monkey paw lined up neatly under the projector screen where we watch TV and swore she hadn’t seen any of those for a while.
