Category: Fiction

DP FICTION #117B: “The Lighthouse Keeper” by Melinda Brasher

edited by Ziv Wities

Content note (click for details) Content note: Death, stillbirth, and isolation.

I’m not supposed to talk to the locals, but that’s not a problem because there don’t seem to be any. Not as far as the eye can see. Not in the endless blue I can’t look away from. Not along the windswept bluffs high above that crashing, ever-changing vastness that makes me feel smaller than I’ve ever felt. And yet bigger. More alone. And less.

I must keep the light burning at all times.

And I must never, never climb down to the beach.

I’m content with these rules. A woman in my position is grateful for a job. Grateful for the quiet. For no eyes to watch me. Revile me.

I have a milk cow. A clutch of chickens. A garden the last lighthouse keeper planted neatly, then almost let die. And I have the sea. A beautiful fierceness I don’t yet understand.

***

“What do you know of the sea?” the man who hired me demanded, weeks ago, sitting on a bench on the street while people stared at us and whispered behind their hands.

“It’s… big. Bigger than our lake.” I tried to think of anything else that might satisfy him, but sea was just a word to me then. I hesitated. “Pearls. Pearls come from the sea.”

“You won’t be seeing a single pearl in this job. Let’s get that clear.”

I nodded. I understood. He had no idea how well.

Thin and sharp-looking, he didn’t smile, even when his lips tried. But he wasn’t treating me like a mangy dog. “What do you know about sea laws? Sailing techniques?”

“Nothing.” Surely he’d dismiss me now for my ignorance.

“What function does a lighthouse serve?”

I wasn’t even sure of that. “Maybe it helps sailors find a place to land?”

He grunted and muttered, “Finding isn’t the problem.” Then he narrowed his eyes at me. “I think you’ll do.”

“What?”

“The job’s yours, if you want it.”

Relief shot through me. Or fear. “I want it.”

“Wait until you hear the rules. You might change your mind.”

***

The first night, the peace was so complete I cried with the beauty of it. The waves crashed below, their faint rhythm strangely comforting. No other sound came, once the cliff birds settled down. Just me and the sea. The beam turned around and around, like the sun moving through a thousand days and nights, separating me from all before, moving me to a time when there was only peace. I needed peace.

***

The sharp-faced man never gave me his name. I never questioned it. “You understand,” he said, it’s very lonely.”

“Yes.”

“Very, very lonely.”

“Are you trying to scare me away?”

“Are you easily scared?”

“No.”

“Perfect.”

I wasn’t scared of loneliness. I’d faced plenty of it, surrounded by people I thought I knew. It would be a relief to be lonely alone.

“Pack up. It’s a long journey.”

***

When he first hired me, I’d assumed I would be cleaning whatever a lighthouse was. That’s what unmarried women did. If you couldn’t find a husband, you became a cleaner or a cook. Or that other job decent folk didn’t talk about. “That’s all women are good for,” a greasy-bearded man once spat at a ragged woman on my street. I’d shivered, as if I knew people would one day look at me that way. But apparently, in the lands by the sea, women can be lighthouse keepers. Maybe butchers and cartwrights too. Maybe anything’s possible here.

I spend my days high on this bluff, polishing the beautiful cut glass of the lens, winding the mechanism that turns it, clearing the vents. I make repairs. I chop wood. I inspect the wick and ready the oil. The sharp-looking man taught me these things, and now I feel a glorious power in them. If the light goes out, it’s my fault. If it stays lit, it’s my triumph. I’ve never felt so exhilarated.

The loneliness hasn’t truly set in. Maybe it never will.

***

One day I find a razor fallen behind a cabinet. A man’s razor. It’s the only evidence I’ve seen of the previous keeper—except of course for the wilting garden I’ve nursed back to health. So lighthouse keepers aren’t always women here. When I ask about the previous keeper, the man who brings supplies every two weeks says he doesn’t know anything. But when we first met, he knew exactly where to stash the supplies.  His horse knew the path.  I think he’s been doing this for a while.

I won’t pry. I’ve been on the other side of prying. But I let myself imagine what he looked like. How he spent his time.

Why he left.

***

A lighthouse warns sailors of rocky shoals where their ships may run aground. I learned that from the sharp-looking man. A lighthouse means life or death. It makes me swell with pride. As yet, I’ve only seen three ships, all keeping their distance. That means the light is doing its job. Sometimes I wish they would come a little closer. Close enough they can see what care I take to protect them.

Most afternoons I sit near the cross I carved and talk to the one I couldn’t protect. I’ve outlined the tiny plot with white rocks I found along the bluffs. I’ll plant flowers there next spring. It comforts me to imagine her soul at rest among the salty breezes, and the big open sky, and the distant crashing of waves. It’s a good place to rest.

***

The first big storm comes one warm night. The wind shoves its arms through the cracks around the windows and tries to steal my light, which keeps puffing out and bursting back to life, a tragedy and a miracle repeating relentlessly for hours. I sit up the whole night in the lantern room, high above the ground, as rain lashes the shuddering glass, and I protect the flame with my body.

At dawn I search the sea for wrecked ships and cry in relief when there are none. The pea vines in the garden have torn loose from their stakes. They wave in the wind like the tentacles of the sea monster I found in a book behind the flour crock.

***

That night, exhausted, I go to bed earlier than usual.  Earlier than I should.  I wake to wind screaming around the lighthouse again. Something is very wrong. I drag myself to the window.

The darkness is complete.

Did I forget to top up the oil? I fumble for my bedside lamp and try to light it, but my hands shake, my throat tight. I give up and feel my way to the stairway that winds up and up. Hand on the wall, I ascend into blackness, legs trembling, wind howling like a newborn child. I finally burst into the lantern room, made mostly of windows, and see the full splendor of the night sky for the first time, the darkness undiluted by the light. Half the sky is clouded, but on the landward side the stars shine brighter than I’ve ever seen, so many they’re a fog of light, not a sprinkling. It’s beautiful. But wrong. Wrong.

I stretch my hands out to the nearest window and follow until I find the open one, its latch broken. My eyes are adjusting. I wedge the window tight with rags, muting the fury of the wind, but still it sings through the cracks, a lonely and terrible lullaby.

I pull myself away. The lens is still turning. At least I didn’t fail to wind it before bed. I check the lamp. I’ve done this so many times now my fingers don’t need much help from my eyes. The oil reservoir is full enough, the air inlets unblocked. I tug at the wick, where it often slips out of place. I strike a match. A tiny glow pushes back the darkness, but the wind snuffs it. I light another. Cup my hands around it. The wick catches. The revolving glass glows brighter and brighter. A beam pierces the darkness.

I breathe deep and steady myself, legs even shakier now that my immediate task is done. I scan the sea. Its surface looks dull, choppy, but I can’t see any ships, any sign of trouble. I watch the light for long moments—not looking directly at it because the brightness hurts.

Something in me misses the darkness.

***

The window latch fixed, the oil reservoir filled, the mechanism wound, I make my blind way back downstairs. The sea is still empty, peaceful in its submission to the wind. I crawl into bed and dream of her.

***

They wouldn’t let me dress her little body. Pearl, I named her. Pearl was just a word then, like sea. A soft, shiny word that meant far-away places and unimagined beauty. Now my pearl has returned with me to the sea. Even if her body hasn’t.

***

The night is endless. This time what wakes me isn’t the wind. The building settling? Shutters swinging in a breeze I can’t hear? I lie perfectly still until it comes again, long and slow and purposeful. Scratching. On the door.

No one comes here. In all these weeks, no one has knocked but the man who brings the supplies. And he’s not due for days.

Scraaaatch.

A wild animal, in need of help? A demon?

Scraaatch.

A soft thud. Then a word. “Please.”

The same word I screamed as they took my baby away.

“Please,” the voice comes again. A man’s voice, but weak like a child’s.

I creep out of bed, grab my cooking knife, light the lamp, and tiptoe to the door. It’s latched. I always latch doors now when I sleep. I never used to. His appearance at my bed that night was not unwelcome. I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me. I would have opened the door for him at his first sweet word. I was foolish then. But I sleep with latches now. “Who are you?” I yell through the door. “Where did you come from?”

“Ship…” he answers, as if that’s all he has strength for.

Don’t say it, I plead.

“Ship… sank.”

All I can see is Pearl’s body, cold and gray and tiny. I imagine it sinking below the dark water. Sinking, sinking.

“Please,” the man begs.

I unlatch the door. If this is a trick, if a thief or a murderer lies on the other side, or a man who wants what every man wants, who will get what he wants and then leave me to pick up the pieces, then I deserve it. I open the door.

It looks more like a pile of rags than a man. Wet. Crumpled. When he lifts his face, it’s bloody. A gash across his temple. Another on his collarbone where his clothing has torn. He’s young. Practically a boy. He tries to push himself up.

I help him into the room. Into my bed. I tuck all my blankets around him. His heartbeat is slow, his forehead clammy. I touch the leg he was favoring. He gasps in pain. His face goes white. “Shh,” I coo. “I’ll get you some water.”

I quickly light a fire. Sprinkle herbs into a pot.

He lies still, breathing slowly.

I run up the stairs and wrestle the unwieldy black shield out of its cabinet. The wood is thin, but its size makes it heavy, and my arms shake as I hold it up, blocking the light while I count in my head. I pull it away, count, put it back up, count. I hope someone’s watching. I repeat the distress signal seven times. I’d do it more, but the man in my bed needs me. I run back down to find him still asleep. The water is warm, aromatic. I rouse the man and feed it to him like a baby.

His eyes hardly focus, but his breathing sounds stronger. I pull the covers away long enough to assure myself he’s not bleeding badly and wrap him back up.

I pull on my boots and head out into the wind, over to the edge of the cliffs, where I can see straight down to the beach and the rocks below, where a ship founders. I can still see the mast, tilted at a terrible angle, and other bits of the ship rising like a serpent from the water. Something bobs further out. What if more survivors are dying down there? It’s so far. There’s no good path. It’s dark. And I swore never to climb down to the beach.

But I’ve already broken my other vow. I let the light go out. I caused this. If you’re stealing an egg, might as well steal the salt, my father used to say. Before he slapped me so hard my vision blurred, and I saw his disgust three times over. Before he threw me out. He never knew my little Pearl was a girl.

I check on the sailor once more. He’s feverish, but I think he’s too stubborn to die. So I gather supplies. The noise rouses him. “You were singing,” he says. “So beautiful.”

“I wasn’t singing.”

He smiles. “Like an angel.”

I pat his hand, wipe his forehead with a cool cloth, and go face the cliffs.

***

The way down to the beach looks dangerous. I’ve sometimes wondered if the last lighthouse keeper slipped and fell to his death. Thus the rule. But if an injured, half-drowned sailor can make it up these cliffs, in the dark and the wind, surely I can make it down. I search for the least-precarious route. Maybe my eyes have already contemplated this, because now my feet seem to know the way.

It’s still terrifying—a slippery-thin edge of earth high above the nothingness of air and sea. I test each footstep. I cling to bushes. I try not to look farther than I need to.

I’m halfway down when a burst of wind drives straight into me. I totter. The sea lies so far below, scattered with rocks that will tear my body to shreds. I throw myself against the cliff and cling there, stone cutting into my cheek, one hand around a low plant that I pretend will hold me back if I start to slip. I don’t slip. I manage to breathe. Eventually, my feet start moving.

I’m using both hands, both feet, while wood creaks below me and no voices cry out for help. The light swings slowly overhead, sending its beam into the black. I begin to count the revolutions as I descend. And suddenly there’s no more to descend.

I run along the beach. “Can anyone hear me?”

Nothing. Just the crash of the sea, much louder here. There’s a sort of fizz too, not just the crash. It’s beautiful. I stop in the silence. Bend down. Touch the water. It caresses my hand. When I bring my finger to my tongue, it’s salty. Just like they said it would be. Like the tears I cried alone, after they took Pearl’s body. But here, the salt is a comfort. A balm.

I don’t understand why I’m not allowed to come here.

Then the half-sunk ship creaks and I remember myself. I scour the beach. No one. No live men, panting and shivering, looking for shelter, calling for help. No dead men, washed up on the sand, still and cold. There’s a piece of wood. Waves drag it in and out. The ship groans and tilts even more. If anyone’s trapped in there, they’d be dead by now.

I know this. But I keep calling for survivors.

I can’t swim. Even if I could, there doesn’t seem to be any hope. But there is still hope for the man in the lighthouse. So I touch the water one more time, a farewell, then turn my back on the ship and start to climb.

They’re there when I get back up: the man who brings me supplies and the sharp-faced one who hired me. They’re hauling the sailor out of the lighthouse.

“Wait! He needs rest,” I protest.

“Did he speak?” The hard eyes in the sharp face make me feel small.

“Only a little.”

“Did he say anything about why his ship sank?”

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

“The rocks…” I whisper. “The light.”

“Which you let go out. Don’t deny it.”

“I’m not. The wind—”

“You’re just as worthless as the last keeper. Three rules. That’s all I asked.”

“I tried.”

“I rescued you from your shame. Now you’ve dragged it here with you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know the wind was so powerful. I’ll never let it go out again.”

“No, you won’t. Pack your things. You’re leaving.”

“I can do better.”

“I don’t think you can.”

“Where will I go?” My father says I’m dead to him. Pearl’s father, when I told him I was with child, pretended he hadn’t heard. The next morning his foreman came to fire me. My friends turned their backs. “What will I do?”

“Whatever you must.”

***

The sun rises over the sea as I sit on the cliff, everything I own in two bags beside me. The sky’s pinks and yellows are improbably beautiful.

They took away the sailor. Wouldn’t let me say goodbye. Told me which direction to walk to get to the nearest village. Then locked the lighthouse and headed off in the opposite direction.

Now I sit and cry for the sailors lost below. I tell them I’m sorry. But I keep imagining them laughing in my face, spitting at my feet. I wonder if any of them left women on land. Women large with child, reduced to begging on the streets after everyone abandoned them. Women who would starve themselves to feed their children, but who would praise the hunger, because the alternative was a cold, lifeless bundle wrapped in rags in the uncaring arms of a man who wouldn’t even let you kiss your baby goodbye.

I sit and I stare at the waves. The sunrise is gone.

It’s then I hear a sound far below, faint and sweet. A baby. Crying.

I leave everything and scramble down the path I found last night. The rules don’t matter anymore.

“I’m coming!” I slip in the mud and keep descending.

The baby keeps crying, a soft mewling that Pearl never got to make.

“I’m almost there, sweetling!”

When I hit the beach, more wreckage from the ship has washed ashore. I have to pick my way through it, following the cries. I nearly step on something that is not wood. A body. My mind registers it coldly. Just another obstacle. I head toward the far end of the beach, where I can make out a cave of sorts. That’s where she is. The baby.

I jump over another body. A barrel that still smells of wine. If there were a raging fire, I would run through that. I would dive into the sea, knowing I may drown.

At last, I reach the cave. “Sweetling, all’s well. I’m here.”

But the crying has stopped. Where is she? I search the light and shadows inside.

Something splashes behind me. I turn. There, pulling herself onto a rock, still half in the water, is a woman. Beautiful, with skin so pale it almost shimmers. Her dark hair cascades into the water. Her gown floats around her like sea foam. She smiles at me like she knows me. Like she knows everything about me. Knows and understands. And won’t turn away.

She opens her arms. “My sister.” Her voice rumbles like the waves. “You’ve come at last.”

I wade into the water, toward her. “Where… where’s the baby?”

She reaches out. I’m not afraid. Her fingers—light like the breezes off the sea—touch the hollow place where my heart is. “Your baby is here.”

I nod. Because it’s true. Because the truth breaks my heart again. She pulls me into her arms. No one has embraced me for a very long time. I weep, and the sea weeps with me.

“No man will ever hurt you again,” she whispers. “You will find peace.”

And somehow I believe her.

***

The gale is fierce. Its strength becomes our own. The wailing wind snuffs out the light above. Then my sister begins to sing, the music so beautiful I cry. She stops. And I start.

The ship in the dark changes course. Heads toward us. Without the warning beacon on the cliff, the night becomes ours alone.

No one will hurt us. Ever again. Our voices become a duet.

When the ship runs aground on the jagged rocks, something in my soul relaxes. The ship tilts, just like the other did. Men scream. Splash. Sink into the darkness and never come up.

One ragged sailor crawls onto shore, lust in his eyes, and I am not afraid. He has an earring in one ear. A pearl. I will take it from him.

And I will never let it go.

© 2024 by Melinda Brasher

3500 words

Author’s Note: Lighthouses have always fascinated me—especially the isolated ones.  Would life there bring madness or solace?  And what happens when the light fails?  “The Lighthouse Keeper” sprang from these questions. 

Melinda Brasher spends her time writing, traveling, and hiking. Her talents include navigating by old-fashioned map, mashing multiple languages together in foreign train stations, and dealing cards really fast.  You can find her work in Uncharted, ZNB Presents, the Just Chills podcast, and others. Visit her at www.melindabrasher.com or on Facebook as Melinda Brasher, Writer.

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DP FICTION #117A: “Song for a Star-Whale’s Ghost” by Devin Miller

edited by Chelle Parker

Captain Ruby Tauda of the whale-ship Balentora strapped down a crate of medicine and hurried across the star-whale’s mouth. She and her crew had always used the mouth as a cargo bay, but this wasn’t their usual cargo. They weren’t thieves.

“Secure?” Ruby asked her copilot, Loto, pausing with her hand over the comms button sewn delicately to the wall.

“Secure, Captain,” Loto confirmed as he pulled one last strap tight.

Ruby slammed her hand down on the comms button to give the command. “Cargo secure. Go.”

“Going,” Johnnie Quo, Balentora’s navigator, said. “Looks like we have enough cover.”

The plan had been to blend in with other departing ships and hope no one on Port Helleta noticed the missing star-whale medicine before they got away. They weren’t thieves, but then they’d learned that Balentora’s grandchildren and their age-mates were sick with a degenerative muscle disease. Port Helleta’s authorities had medicine that could help, but they couldn’t agree whether to use it. If the star-whales’ illness killed them, that meant more dead star-whales for humans to fly—far more. And while they debated, the whales were running out of time.

Balentora had been dead for decades. Ruby, in her youth, had found it drifting in a star-whale graveyard and politely sung its ghost the traditional shanty to ask, “Would you fly for me?” The ghost had been lucid enough then to say yes.

“Wait,” Johnnie said, their voice taut. Ruby’s already nervous stomach did a dive. “There’s an enforcer ship behind us.”

“Following us?” If they were caught, they’d be imprisoned. Worse, the sick star-whales would die before anyone decided what to do with the medicine.

A full star-whale life could last three hundred years. Ruby had been taught never to fly a whale-ship with an unwilling ghost, and only to ask star-whales who had died of old age for their service. But not all humans followed those principles, and star-whales were desirable ships—they could sing to the universe, open thresholds through space without the aid of a gate. That was more than enough reason for Port Helleta’s authorities to consider refusing to help.

“Yes. Yes, it’s following us. Shit.”

“Then we need to run.”

Loto was already galloping up the whale’s throat. Ruby didn’t have to tell him to get his violin ready; they’d been crewing Balentora together for years.

The whale’s ghost had grown less lucid in that time. It got confused easily. After the first few times it had failed to understand more complex songs, Ruby had stopped singing them. She knew there might only be a few more years where Balentora could fly, and it hurt to see it struggle.

Worrying about whether Balentora was up for complicated maneuvering, Ruby hurried through the sloping hallways from the whale-ship’s mouth to its left eye, their command center. The inside of the whale-ship was soft like the flesh of an almost-ripe peach, celadon in color and odorless. Its skin had calcified until it was impermeable to space debris.

The eye socket cradled Johnnie’s blinking screens, comms equipment, charts, and the detritus of their lives on board the star-whale. Ruby shoved an empty coffee mug aside and grabbed her concertina, sliding her thumbs through the straps. She leaned over Johnnie’s chair and looked through Balentora’s eye. Their getaway route was littered with the other ships orbiting, leaving, and arriving at Port Helleta station. Beyond was the sparkling darkness of space, and the octagonal orange shimmer of Helleta gate. If they could just reach it ahead of the enforcers, they could get through to Crocosmia space, where Helleta’s authorities would be forced to do bureaucratic battle to retrieve the stolen cargo.

Loto hurtled in, out of breath, holding his violin case. He knelt on the floor to snap open the case and extract the instrument.

Johnnie’s fingers flew over their navigation panel, calculating the positions of the other ships, their trajectories and speed, finding a route through. Ruby stood and planted her feet, and Loto’s arms bent into graceful curves, readying his violin and bow. Johnnie set the metronome ticking, and Ruby’s breath hitched. That was faster than they’d asked Balentora to fly in a very long time.

A clear, familiar A♭ rolled off Johnnie’s tongue as they sang the crew into the music. That was a turn to starboard, and Ruby knew the five bars of music that followed like she knew her own turning feet. Johnnie held up six fingers for six repetitions, the degree of turn, and the words to the song poured out of their mouth as the concertina breathed between Ruby’s hands and the strings of Loto’s violin vibrated through the eye socket.

“Oh, the land is below us, the seas are behind,” Johnnie sang,

“and the sky is no longer a ceiling.

Hey, ho, breathe in the stars, love,

your mouth fills with joy and with dreaming.

Cast off from the station, swim fast now,

we all know there’s love in the leaving.”

Ruby loved that voice, the song, the instrument in her hands, the whale. She’d learned this art at her mother’s knee. It felt like hers, part of her body, inextricable. She almost felt as if she and the whale’s ghost were still young. She remembered what it was like to know the whale would respond to every breath of music.

Johnnie changed the song, asking the whale to dive. The metronome ticked frenetically. Ruby wasn’t sure she’d made Balentora’s ghost understand what was happening to its grandchildren. It didn’t recognize the cargo in its mouth. She could tell it didn’t understand why they were asking it for such speed. Through the eye, Ruby saw a long-haul passenger ship almost straight ahead. But Balentora responded to the familiar dive song, and they passed under the other ship, alarmingly close to its belly.

The ghost strained and heaved the whale’s body through space. Ruby’s hands felt slippery with sweat; she was terrified she’d hit a wrong note. Loto’s bow arm was a blur.

Johnnie navigated them around a tiny shuttle, cueing Ruby and Loto’s music with hand gestures and their voice. They weren’t far from the gate now, but Ruby could see the blinking indicator of the enforcer ship on scan, and it was gaining on them.

They slipped past a buoy, and the orange of the gate was vivid and staticky with energy ahead of them. Nearly there, Ruby thought, concertina alive with sound between her hands.

Suddenly another ship surged into view, blocking their path. Loto made a noise like he’d been kicked in the belly.

Johnnie stopped singing, looked frantically between their console and the eye of the whale. “That’s another enforcer,” they muttered. “Where the hell did that come from?”

Two more enforcer ships appeared, flanking the one straight ahead. There was no way to reach the gate now. Johnnie held up a fist to stop the music and the eye of the whale fell abruptly silent. They slowed to drifting.

Johnnie’s comms panel pinged loudly in the silence, and they punched the button to allow the transmission through. “Port Helleta Enforcement to Balentora. We have received a report that your crew is responsible for theft. You are not authorized to leave Helleta space. Prepare to be boarded. You have five minutes to acknowledge.”

No. It rang through Ruby’s mind, through her whole body. They couldn’t get caught. They had to get the medicine to Balentora’s grandchildren.

“We could hide the cargo,” Loto said. “Try to deny it.”

Ruby shook her head. “We don’t know how much evidence they have.”

“What else are we going to do?” Johnnie asked. “Balentora could have got us out ten years ago, probably, but now…”

It had been years since they’d sung the song asking the whale to open a threshold. They were all afraid to find it wouldn’t answer. Opening thresholds took power the whale’s ghost didn’t have anymore.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Ruby said. “We don’t know it can’t do it.”

Johnnie and Loto stared at her. “You know how slow it is to respond,” Johnnie said, too gently.

“We have no other options.” Desperate and stubborn, and captain of the ship: It was Ruby’s call.

She sang the first line of the shanty to ask a star-whale to be a ship. It felt like a way to remind Balentora, to cue the aging mind of the whale’s ghost. Then she changed the song.

Ruby remembered the threshold song, of course. She remembered all the songs, even if Balentora didn’t.

“Ask the black to bloom, my love,” Ruby sang. Loto still looked doubtful, but he joined her anyway, pulling the music from his violin. Johnnie added their voice. Ruby felt the whale’s ghost turn its attention to them, curious, confused.

The ghost considered, its unstable mind sifting through the request. Ruby closed her eyes.

Balentora broke into answering song. Its music filled the whale-ship, resounding through its fins and tail. It sang as it hadn’t sung in years. It remembered, maybe, what they were running for. It remembered the joy of opening a threshold.

A threshold opened. It glinted with the no-color shine of between-space, hiding the enforcer ships and the gate behind it. Music filled the whale’s mouth and its crystallized eyeballs. There was only a moment where they were outside the threshold looking in, and then they were swimming through the waves of between-space for a time-tilted whole note. Ruby forgot how to breathe. Then the threshold spit them back into normal space.

Ruby felt tears wetting her eyelashes. For so long, she’d been gentling the whale along, not asking its ghost to do anything challenging. That had not kept at bay her sadness over its fading understanding. And, she realized now, it would not lighten her memory of Balentora’s last few years of flight. What she would remember were moments like this one: doing something big, something that mattered enormously. Trusting Balentora’s ghost enough to try, and seeing what it could do.

“We’re in Crocosmia space,” Johnnie said, checking the scan. “But nowhere near the other side of Helleta gate. They’ll have no way of finding us.”

The ghost’s song trailed off, but Ruby felt it smile and turn unerringly towards star-whale home-space. Balentora’s grandchildren would live.

© 2024 by Devin Miller

1710 words

Author’s Note: This story was inspired by several prompts I mashed together, one of which was “invent an alien aquarium,” and another of which was this David Bowie quote: “On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.” And from there I got to piloting a whale ship by singing space shanties to its ghost. Since real whales sing, using music to communicate was the obvious choice. I’m not a musician, however, and after the first draft, when I thought, “I guess I can’t totally handwave how this works, how unfortunate,” I made my much-more-musical-than-me girlfriend help me figure out how it should work. Whales were also an obvious choice, because I’m kind of a nerd about whales. I am full of whale facts, which I mostly did not use in the story, but here’s a cool musical one: In 1979, National Geographic included a whale song record with the magazine, which at the time had a circulation of 10.5 million. This is still the largest single print order of any recording ever made.

Devin Miller is a queer, genderqueer cyborg and lifelong denizen of Seattle, with a love of muddy beaches to show for it. Their short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, and Strange Horizons; their poetry received an honorable mention in the 2022 Rhysling Awards and once appeared on a King County Metro bus terminal. You can find Devin under a tree, probably, or at devzmiller.com.

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DP FICTION #116B: “Bone Talker, Bone Eater” by D.S. Ravenhurst

edited by Chelle Parker

Mama’s bones scream as the writhing mass of beetles cleans her skeleton. My fingers bury themselves in my ears against my will, trying to block the shrieking no one else can hear and the squish of macerated flesh they can. I don’t know which one’s worse.

The hedgewitch watches me from beneath her fur-trimmed hood, her sunken eyes eerily like the beetles in the flickering lantern light. I look towards the silent forest, the trees an army of mourners watching the funeral beneath the velvet sky. The spaces between them could hide countless monsters, but nothing there scares me more than the yawning space at my side where Mama has always stood.

Not even the whispers of the villagers on the other side of the beetle well, or the way they shrink from me in fear.

None of them can hear the bones.

I first heard them ten years ago. I was seven, and they whispered inside the wall, the click and chatter of a decaying mouse. It was a sound I heard in my own bones, like the marrow called to its sister. A cold sound, not meant for the living. Even then, I knew not to tell people I could hear the bones, knew they’d say I was no better than a Bone Eater myself. I didn’t tell Mama until I was eleven, when Granny died and we took her bones down to the crypt.

Granny’s bones didn’t scream. They sang with the sort of sad contentment that I now know only comes from a life well-lived and a peaceful passing. Mama didn’t get that. The wasting sickness didn’t let her have even that at the end.

I sink to my knees before Mama’s beetle-swathed corpse, waiting for the last of her pain to stop boring through my eardrums, rattling my skull. A hand clamps on my arm, bony fingers digging deep into my tender flesh as though they might rip it from my bones just like the beetles.

“Up, Suvi.” The hedgewitch’s red-painted, hollow-eyed face wavers into view through my tears. “It’s time to go.” She jerks her head towards the cloaked villagers sidling towards us from the other side of the pit like vultures. Only they aren’t looking at Mama’s corpse. They’re looking at me.

“She’ll bring a Bone Eater down on us,” someone says.

I flinch. I don’t want to be a Bone Eater’s meal any more than they do.

I stumble to my feet and follow the hedgewitch through the grasping trees. My arms drop from my ears with relief as the shriek of Mama’s bones fades, and I nearly choke on the bitter guilt of leaving before the defleshing was complete. The dead aren’t supposed to be left alone until their bones are laid to rest in the crypt. Safe from the Bone Eaters.

The hedgewitch pulls me through the front door of her squat, moss-covered hut and pushes me onto a rough-hewn chair.

“They’ll not wait much longer. Not with your mother gone.” She spits in the corner to keep Mama’s spirit at bay.

“I know.”

The wind sets the trees to caressing the bubbled glass of the window above the hedgewitch’s work table, and I feel as though the touch follows the curve of my spine instead. The villagers have been baying for my blood since old Ritva heard me telling Mama the slaughtered hog in the smokehouse was scaring me because its bones wouldn’t stop screaming. I was only eleven, and they tried to stone me. No one wants a Bone Talker nearby. They always blame us when the Bone Eaters find them. Mama was no witch, but she hadn’t been afraid to barter for whatever power she needed to keep me safe. Even her health.

I ought to hate the hedgewitch for that. For taking Mama away from me. Or maybe I should hate Mama for selling her life for mine. But there is a chasm in my chest where my feelings are supposed to be, and the only thing clinging to the handholds of my ribs is grief.

“Will you run?”

I appreciate that she doesn’t tell me I should. That she doesn’t act like leaving the only place I’ve ever known and the only people who’ve ever loved me—for all they’re naught but bones now—is the obvious choice. I should run. I could leave and make my way through the woods and across the Salted Plain to the city, choose a new name, start a new life.

But cities are built on the bones of their past. The forest twines its roots through the skulls of its creatures. There is nowhere I can go where the bones won’t call to me. Someone always notices, sooner or later. And then comes the fear.

“No,” I say, and the word snaps like a femur.

She watches me over the sharp ridges of her painted cheekbones. The lantern light can’t drive the flickering shadow of fear from her eyes. “I still owe you my protection. I do not go back on my bargains.” The twist of her mouth adds a silent ‘However much I want to.’

“Thank you.” I let her think the words are for her, but they are for Mama.

I have settled down to an uneasy rest when we hear them outside. At first, in my sleep-fuddled haze, I think it’s just the branches again, but branches don’t wail and shout like that. Those cries are reserved for humans and bones.

The noise resolves into words. “Bone Talker! Come out! You can’t hide behind the hedgewitch’s skirts.”

I recognize the voice of the village headwoman, Leppa.

“Ignore them, girl,” says the hedgewitch. “They can’t get past the twisted pines.” I do not know if she means the trees merely mark whatever wards she keeps on her home or if the eyes I’ve felt on the back of my neck in this forest are more than my imagination.

I press my face to the window and peer into the night. Lanterns glow like eyes among the tree trunks.

“Come out now, Bone Talker, or we will grind your mother’s bones to dust and let them blow into the Salted Plain.” Leppa drops a sack on the ground in front of her, and I hear the bones cry out with the impact, their yelp of pain withering to a moan. The voice of Mama’s bones may not be that of her living voice, but I would still recognize it anywhere.

A small, broken sound escapes me. Without Mama’s bones safely interred in the crypt, how will her soul recognize Granny in the afterlife? How will she watch over me, stuck here without her? How will she find me when I eventually join her in the forests of the dead?

The mob can’t do anything worse to me than that. And Mama’s bargain with the hedgewitch only protects me, not herself.

“Consider your bargain fulfilled.” I lurch through the front door, shaking off the hedgewitch’s clawed fingers, ignoring the sting as her nails break the skin on my upper arm.

As soon as I pass the twisted pines whispering warnings into the cold night, the villagers surround me. But Mama’s bones sigh in recognition.

I stumble on their cloaks as they drag me along in a puddle of lantern light, hissing their rage with words I don’t bother to parse. Mama’s bones chitter with worry as the sack swings from Leppa’s hand in front of me. The ground begins to slope beneath my feet, the walls of the gorge rising to block out the stars, and I know where they’re taking me.

At least I’ll be with Mama and Granny at the end.

Hands drag me through the narrow fissure into the vestibule where mourners come to burn offerings to keep their departed loved ones quiet. They fear the bones as much as they revere them. My foot scuffs through the ashes of an old fire, and the quiet chorus of the bones in the crypt sets my rib cage to resonating in harmony. Most of these bones are old enough that their voices are mellow, the pain of their time among the living faded to a faint dissonant whine beneath the chord.

Mama’s bones in their sack bark with a rawness that carves into my sternum each time they carom off the ground or Leppa’s legs. They should have been laid out with care, marched through the village and down to the crypt on a litter strewn with living green, lovingly placed into the crypt by me, her only living relative. Instead, Leppa lifts the bar on the door to the crypt and hurls the sack into the darkness. She didn’t even bother to knot the sack closed, and Mama’s bones chatter as they spill onto the floor.

“Better you’re with your own kind, Bone Talker.”

I don’t make them push me. I fall to my knees inside the crypt, collecting Mama’s bones against me, making the same sort of hushing noises I’d use with a nervous cat. Or a baby, but no one has let me near an infant since they found out I was a Bone Talker.

Leppa drops her lantern by my feet, and then the door shuts behind me. The bar falls into place with a muffled thump, and I am locked in.

Alone, but not alone.

Empty eye sockets webbed in spider-spun shadows watch me from the grinning skulls that line the corridor, singing their welcome. They seem to stretch on forever beyond the small globe of light cast by the lantern.

Mama’s bones hum with contentment at my touch, joining the chorus of the dead. I gently place Mama back in the sack and stand. My footfalls echo through the maze of chambers, bouncing back to remind me how alone I am, even as the singing bones remind me that I am never alone down here.

I don’t bother to try the door. The bar can’t be dislodged from the inside, and Leppa and the others have been waiting for their chance for years. They won’t have squandered it now.

Though I know I’m walking deeper into the crypt, it feels as though I haven’t moved at all, bubbled in golden light, watched by a hundred pairs of depthless eyes. Every so often, a new chamber branches off this original corridor, walled in bones, with magnificent arches built of long bones sweeping to meet a flared rib cage in the center.

After an unknowable amount of time, I reach the newest of these chambers, with half its shelves still empty, bare even of dust thanks to the wards. The bones are louder here. Fresher. They haven’t forgotten who they are, yet. I place Mama’s skull on the middle shelf and kiss her forehead.

“What am I going to do?” Even whispered, my words split the still air like a broken tibia through skin. I have no food. No water. I knew I’d die here when I left the hedgewitch’s hut, but there is knowing a thing and being confronted with it, and I find I do not want to die just yet, not even to join Mama and Granny in the forests of the dead.

Mama’s skull hums louder, a lullaby that I know is meant to be comforting. But there is no comfort strong enough to warm me here, in the grave. I’m already dead; my heart just hasn’t realized it, yet.

The incorrigible thump of it skips a beat as the sound of footsteps echoes through the crypt. The feet belong to something large, something heavy. Something scrapes along the stone with every step.

The sound grows louder and the bones grow restless, jabbering with agitation. From another chamber, a crack reverberates, a high, terrible shriek chasing it through the maze of chambers. I sink to the ground, still clutching Mama’s humerus—whether as a comfort or a weapon, I’m no longer sure.

A Bone Eater. The thought brushes the back of my neck like a lock of wet hair, sending a trickle of terror down my spine. The wards are supposed to keep the Bone Eaters out. But the crypt sprawls deep into the rock, and there’s only the old sentinel Otha and her apprentice to keep the wards. And no ward is ever perfect.

Better you’re with your own kind.

The bones? Or the Bone Eater?

I choke down a bitter laugh. What does it matter? Dead of thirst or dead at a Bone Eater’s feet, dead is dead.

The scraping footsteps are closer now, the screaming of the bones making me clasp my ribs to keep them from shattering. I can’t tell where the bone cries end and my own terrified shaking begins. Somewhere in this crypt, the Bone Eater lurks, with his char-black beak and crown of splintered bones. I tremble as I imagine the flash of claws and beak, the spray of blood, joining Mama and Granny in the forests of the dead. Another bone lets out the scream that’s trapped in my throat, and I feel the crack as he splits it open, looking for marrow. Thousands of bones beg me for help.

Maybe I’m the real monster, because I cower with half of Mama’s bones in my lap and let the Bone Eater do it. I don’t want to be cracked open for marrow either.

I fix my eyes on the empty doorway and wait for it not to be empty anymore.

When the Bone Eater finds me, I stop hearing the bones. I know they are still screaming. I can still feel their fear. But my world has narrowed to liquid black eyes and a hooked black beak.

“Bone Talker.” His beak clicks when he speaks. His voice is harsh, raw. Like the bones he eats have torn his throat to shreds. “Welcome. It has been a long time since I’ve seen one of my own.”

My lips tremble as I stare up at him, my fingers aching with the strength of my grip on Mama’s humerus. One of his own?

“They are right to fear you. But you have no need of fear. Take the power that is yours.”

He steps into the chamber, his talons dragging across the stone. I am frozen. I may as well be one of the skeletons on the shelves for all the good my living flesh does.

“What do you mean?”

“Seize your power. You’re holding it in your hands.” He nods to Mama’s bone in my hands, the polished protrusion of the shoulder joint above my fist, and his crown of cracked bones sends spears of shadow through the lamplight. “Let me show you.”

He turns to the shelves and selects a bone, a scapula this time. He brings it to his face and drags his beak across its edge with the barest touch, savoring it. Without warning, his beak flashes and the bone cracks. The Bone Eater digs his beak into the marrow and feeds.

The Bone Eater’s presence mutes the shrieking of the bones, but I can still hear the echoes from before he arrived. My jaw clenches.

He turns his glittering eyes on me. “You need not join the bones. You hear them. You can join me. If your people will fear you anyway, do something to deserve that fear. And live.”

I look down at Mama’s bones, run my hands along the smooth, cool shafts of the long bones, the curved balls and concave hollows of joints, the ridges and tubercles and foramina. They are too still, too quiet. My ears ring with the absence of their sounds.

“Why can’t I hear them?” The words are too loud in the echoey chamber.

The Bone Eater laughs, beak clicking. “My apologies. That was me.” He makes a courtly bow, one talon skittering across the ground behind him as he inclines his head.

He rises, and the screams return, tearing through my skull, my ribs, making my eyes water.

I should have known. Once the bones start talking, they never stop.

“Please stop scaring them,” I beg. I can hardly feel the vibrations of my own voice over the terror of the bones.

The Bone Eater ruffles his feathers and the wailing of the bones goes dead again. “I cannot. Their fear is only natural. What salmon would not fear the bear?” He turns his back to me. “It is not always so terrible a thing to be feared.”

I snort.

“That’s why you should join me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was once like you. Afraid. And feared. I am still feared. But I am no longer afraid.” He nibbles at the bone still in his hand. “All you need to do is eat.”

My mouth floods with saliva as if I’ve just smelled the freshest bread, and I drop Mama’s humerus in revulsion. How can I want to eat her? But I think of the glee on Leppa’s face when she shut the crypt behind me, and I want to make her pay. Her and every other person who cast me out for this power I didn’t ask for.

“I’ll leave you to think on it. You needn’t fear me until you’re naught but bones. The bones can always tell you where I am, should you choose to join me.”

The frightened cacophony of the bones echoes through the crypt again before his shadow has even crossed the threshold. I bury my face in my knees. I have no way out. I can die here, or I can become a monster. I can’t hear my own thoughts over the bones, and I wait, eyes closed until their panic turns to murmuring anxiety.

I climb to my feet and face Mama’s leering skull. I press my forehead to hers. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Eat and be free,” whispers Mama’s skull without words. “Eat and protect yourself the way I could not.”

It’s like Mama’s bones are the only ones left in the world. The others still sing and talk and cry, but I hear only Mama. “I can’t.”

“You can. They are wrong. I do not need my bones. I am safe in the forests of the dead. Eat, and give the village something real to fear.”

I pick up one of Mama’s tiny finger bones and turn it over in my hands. I raise it to my lips.

It cracks between my molars and the bones begin to scream again.

Someday they will not be the only ones who scream.

© 2024 by D.S. Ravenhurst

3089 words

D.S. Ravenhurst writes horror and fantasy about women faced with impossible situations, impossible choices, and bittersweet, impossible endings. Her work can be found in Shadows on the Water Short Stories (Flame Tree Press, 2024). In between her (too) many hobbies, she studied Linguistics at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, and Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, focusing on the endangerment, minoritization, and revitalization of Celtic languages. When she’s not planning new adventures or listening to sad, traditional Irish and Scottish songs, she can be found Irish dancing.

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DP FICTION #116A: “The Gaunt Strikes Again” by Rich Larson

edited by Chelle Parker

“My friends, I apologize for pulling you away from the festivities,” the Duke said, shutting the heavy oak door behind him, “but I believe our lives to be in danger.” He turned to his guests and drew a deep breath. “It seems the Gaunt has decided to attend our soiree.”

The Beldam, fashionably attired in the skin of a flayed heretic, clapped her beautiful hand to her beautiful cheek. The Raconteur, already flushed and tousle-headed, wine staining his doublet, guffawed. The Corporal, a shard of obsidian in military dress, narrowed her flesh eye while its clockwork neighbor roved about the room.

“This is no jest,” the Duke said, unfolding a parchment leaf with trembling hands. “I found it only moments ago, inserted among the other notices of intention.”

At the sight of the Gaunt’s distinctive seal, the tarry black spiral that had portended countless grisly deaths, the Beldam and the Raconteur both shrieked aloud. The Corporal made no sound, but snatched the parchment from the Duke’s grip.

The Corporal’s clockwork eye split and rotated, bringing its full magnification to bear on the seal.

The other three waited, breaths bated.

“It appears genuine,” the Corporal squeaked.

The Duke had braced himself for this pronouncement, but still felt it like a hammer blow and heard a correspondent ringing in his ears. He searched for words to apologize to his guests, to offer them comfort.

“Then we are doomed.” The Beldam crumpled into the nearest chair, blinking. “Utterly, and entirely.”

The Raconteur pressed back against the wall, an animal cornered. “The Beldam’s correct,” he croaked. “The Gaunt likes nothing better than a soiree turned bloody. Remember the solstice garden party?”

The Beldam grimaced. “They found the Contessa strung from a lemon tree by her own intestines. Remember the carnival boat?”

“The carnival boat! They found the Bishop’s upper half nailed to the prow, and his lower in the bellies of several fishes.” The Raconteur chewed at his lips. “Murderous master of disguise that he is, the Gaunt might already stalk among us. He could be any one of the guests.”

“He, or she,” the Duke pointed out. “Or perhaps they. The Gaunt has never deigned to reveal such specificities.”

“He’s probably slithering through the party at this very instant,” the Raconteur mumbled. “Selecting his victims, slipping his infamous paralytic poison into their drinks…”

The Duke swallowed. “That does sound like him, her, or them,” he said, tugging at his beard. “Corporal, are you armed?”

“I’m always armed.” The Corporal’s clockwork eye was fixed now to the Raconteur. “So is this lad who knows so much about the Gaunt’s methods.”

The Raconteur startled, then straightened. “I make a living from sordid details,” he snapped. “And why shouldn’t I be armed? You’ve no idea how often I have to duel ex-lovers, and lovers of ex-lovers, and critics.”

The Duke raised a placating hand. “It’s quite his right to be armed. And it’s quite obvious that nobody here is the Gaunt.”

The Beldam’s laugh was soft and contemptuous. “Tell another one, Dukie.”

The Duke glared. “‘Dukie’?”

“The Gaunt can sew themselves into any skin they like,” the Beldam said. “They’re a changeling. That’s how they’ve gone uncaught for so long.”

“Rubbish.” The Corporal raised her chin. “The Gaunt is not some unearthly creature. Merely a killer who hides behind incredibly lifelike masks, and has the gift of flawlessly imitating any persona.”

“I imagine some personas would be easier than others, though,” the Raconteur muttered. “A persona with a big bushy beard and a fairly monotone voice, for instance.”

The Duke’s fingers, which had been stroking just such a beard, faltered. “‘Monotone’?” he demanded.

The Raconteur folded his arms. “Your address this evening was painful. I’ve told you time and again to work on your vocal emotive range. At the very least, it would dissuade the Gaunt from impersonating you.”

The Beldam tapped a thoughtful finger to her lips. “If the Gaunt were to impersonate someone, it would be rather sensible to impersonate the host. And then lead the guests to an isolated room, in small groups, to—”

She sliced the finger across her throat and imitated a death rattle. The Raconteur and Corporal followed her gaze to the Duke, whose jaw fell open.

“I brought you here to warn you!” he yelped. “How dare you accuse me of being the Gaunt! You’re the one wearing a human skin and knowing all about changelings.”

All eyes leapt to the flayed stole about the Beldam’s shoulders.

She gave a cutting laugh. “Please! As if the Gaunt could look this good.”

“She does look good,” the Corporal said. Her clockwork eye whirred. “Such facial symmetry seems almost… unnatural.”

She reached into her vest, perhaps for her flintlock, perhaps for her snuff. The Raconteur dove immediately to the floor, yanking the spring-gun from the lining of his doublet. The Beldam leapt from her chair with a direwood knife suddenly clutched in her bony fist.

“Friends!” the Duke croaked. “Come, now. None of us are the Gaunt, and none of us are murderers.” He cast about for a solution, some way to wet the hissing fuse. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle of spirits. “Perhaps we should all have a drink?”

The Raconteur’s eyes widened.

***

Three knocks went unanswered, so finally the servant opened the oak door and stepped inside, tray of canapes held aloft. They were greeted by tragedy:

The Duke, master of the house, gutted by a direwood knife. The Corporal, weathered veteran of a hundred wars, exsanguinated by a shard of glass bottle to the jugular. The beauteous Beldam and the rakish Raconteur, perforated by leadshot in a half-dozen places.

The servant scratched at the burlap of their crudely stitched costume, which was not remotely passable for house garb. They yanked off their flimsy masquerade mask to take a better look at the carnage.

They stared for a moment, then stuffed a canape in their mouth. “This again,” the Gaunt mumbled. “Goddamn it.”

© 2024 by Rich Larson

1001 words

Author’s Note: I wrote this story during the winter of 2021, shortly after watching Clue for the first time.

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and currently writes from Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as the collection Tomorrow Factory. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Japanese, and adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Find free reads and support his work at patreon.com/richlarson.

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DP FICTION #115B: “Batter and Pearl” by Steph Kwiatkowski

edited by Ziv Wities

The sun’s almost down over the boardwalk, that time of day when everything’s dark but the sky’s still lit up, when townies drive past the lake on their way to Gary and say gosh it’s pretty out here by the battervilles, I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

The air’s thick with marina noise and mosquitoes eating up my shirtless chest. I’m pouring my jug of fresh-caught batter into the shuddering funnel of the change machine, even though I know in my heart there’s not enough to buy Ecker the smallest size of honey-glazed crispies. The line for the chicko joint is starting to wind down the boardwalk. Everyone’s yelling, a bunch of sunburned lake-slick battermags pissed I’m taking too long during the dinner rush. But I can’t let it go, not tonight. Ecker is leaving tomorrow to go back to vocational school, and he’s standing at the order window with his hands in his pockets like he’s embarrassed.

“How much left?” I shout. The metal of the machine groans, empty, impatient.

Ecker checks the little grease-smeared screen that’s converting my batter catch into chicko credits. “Thirty-two to go.”

“How much now?” I smack the bottom of my jug. A pathetic thunk of batter hits the funnel.

“Thirty-one.”

“Fuck outta here,” someone calls out from the back of the line. “That thing’s empty.”

“It’s not empty!”

“Did you scrape down the spout?” Ecker’s voice is a wince. He knows how weird the question is when four months ago he was right here with me, hoisting the jug and chanting big money big money while we watched the decimals turn over.

“Yeah, I fuckin’ scraped it down already.” I wipe my forehead against the crook of my elbow.

“Come on,” Ecker says. “Just let me get this with my stipend credits.”

Ecker with townie money, real money. There was a time he would’ve jumped over the counter, grabbed a chicko bucket and dashed. I remember one night specifically he ripped off his shirt before he did it, just to make everyone laugh, or because we were high. He was screaming like the seals in Penguin Slide and his torso was caked with black batter and ferrofluid and I don’t know if that’s the moment I knew I loved him but I think of it a lot, especially at night when there’s no one in the prefab but me and Skeeball, curled up with his little gecko fingers over my collarbone.

“I told you I got it. Just wait a minute, let me think.”

There’s a layer of batter stuck to my arm hairs. Some behind my ears, the oily black sludge of it gone tacky. It’s been a while since I scraped the cracked ridges of my sandals. The crowd hates that one. A wall of boos and groans as the dried-up sprinkling earns me one tenth of a cent.

“Next in line!” The guy at the chicko window’s had enough. He hovers his finger over the button that’ll recall the batter deposit and cancel my order.

“Look I’m so close, please, can you just round up.” I’m tapping the number on the conversion screen with both hands like a crazy person and there’s sweat dripping down my temple and everyone is yelling and I’ve seen the guy round up for everyone in this town including me but for some reason today he won’t because, I find myself screaming, he’s on a power trip in his stupid light-up hat.

He smacks the return button. The change machine vomits back exactly 5.73 credits worth of batter at my feet. The crowd cheers.

***

“It’ll just take a sec,” I tell Ecker. “I’ll take the boat out shallow, get some batter, and come right back.”

The boardwalk’s blinking with lights, boat crews pulling in and unloading their catch, divers stained with ferrofluid, some of them still scraping the batter off their magsuits. They call out to Ecker as we pass: hey big man, how’s school, how’s Illinois, you gonna come fix my septic tank, I got a hell of a block for ya. He responds with banter and a smile. He knows they’re only ribbing him because they’re proud. A battermag that tested good enough to pass the basic modules and go vocational, to a real brick-and-mortar school over the state line.

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t let me come out with you this morning.” Ecker almost trips over the tiny light-up bugs some kids are racing over the planks. “I could’ve helped.”

“What, with those soft little hands you got now?”

The joke drops awkward between us. It’s been like that all weekend. Our whole lives we’ve been giving each other shit, but Ecker came back from school with some kind of armor up. I keep catching him with a weird look on his face, like now, when he’s watching the little group of bug-racing kids. Marina brats, bare feet full of splinters, just like we used to be.

“Alright,” I tell him, voice softer than I mean. “You wanted to come out? We’re going out.”

I gather up Dough-girl from their usual spot, hanging out in front of the kluski joint with a bunch of other teens. The picnic tables are a wreck—red baskets with dumplings and butter pooled in the wax paper, kids crammed along the benches with their module helmets on, tapping their left ears to skim-skim-skim through the lessons. Five years ago it would’ve been me and Ecker here tracing bored lines in the ketchup, blue light flashing over the balled-up napkins. Dough-girl’s in the middle, chewing on a fry through the bottom of their visor.

“Hey.” I knock on Dough-girl’s helmet. “You know you’re supposed to listen to those.”

Dough-girl looks up. I can see Ecker and me reflected in the helmet’s visor, a funhouse mirror of boardwalk neon and the pizza shack behind us.

“You sound like my dad.” Dough-girl’s voice is garbled by the math lesson squeaking from the tinny speakers. “What’s the point?”

“I dunno, learn shit or something.”

“So what, like I’m gonna test out?”

“Christ, Dough-girl, you ever tried to get on a bus? Go on, go to the depot and ask to pay for a ticket with your batterville credits. Might as well be a carmdot punch card.”

Dough-girl rants back but it’s muffled by some kind of science unit about capillaries. I can feel Ecker shift his feet beside me, the discomfort wafting off him.

“Whatever,” I say. “Do what you want. We’re going out again. Fuckin’ chicko guy wouldn’t round up.”

Dough-girl pulls off their helmet. “But it’s dark and we’re out of b-powder. It wasn’t even glowing last time under the blacklight. It’s too cut down.”

“Fine, we’ll get some more. Where’s Brill?”

“Probably sleeping in the boat, right?” Ecker says. He meets my eyes for the first time all night, and it’s then that I realize his hair is curling around his ears even though he doesn’t like it to get so long, that in the four months he was gone he never got it trimmed, that the haircut I’m seeing is the one I gave him in his boxers on the concrete of my front steps.

***

All the unloading stragglers shake their heads when they see us approach their boats, pleading, hopeful, primed to beg. The only one who doesn’t shout us away is Izzie, the last of the olds from back in the day when the cleanup boom first happened, when this town was nothing but deep woods and dead fish rotting on the shore, their bellies swollen with plastic.

Izzie just stands there on the boat deck with the bag of yellow powder, sucking her teeth. A softie. When me and Ecker were little she used to let us crush up the vitamin pills for her. We’d get to swipe a fingerful of batter from her catch tub as a reward. 

“I’ll pay you back,” I say.

“You owe us like a pound of b already.”

“Hey!” Dough-girl points over at Izzie’s partner by the net. He’s sifting out white plastic pellets from the lake weeds and trash. “They caught pearl.”

Only a fistful, but it’s enough for two months’ rent. I’ve always been told that the battervilles started as a settlement; a bunch of tents and prefabs full of people who got demerited out of the big warehouse jobs. Back then Lake Michigan was dying, but not yet dead. The government paid good money to clean up microplastics from the lake, turn it into batter you could collect and slop into a cooler. I saw one of those old commercials once: a tattooed guy and an old lady smiling in this cute painted rowboat, dumping in their dainty bottles of ferrofluid and swishing the water with those tiny magnetic wands that could only catch the world’s saddest clump of batter. It didn’t take long for people to start getting smart, strapping head to toe in duct tape and all the magnets they could find, but it was pearl that made the town boom. Some kind of lawsuit found out that a specific company had spent decades dumping little plastic pellets into lakebound drains, and made them pay big money for every little pearl you could catch. I don’t remember much from my modules, just a picture of a fish, figure A or B or something, spliced open. The white pellets were packed in along the twisty pink of the intestines like the fish had been born with them there, a weird little row of gut teeth.

“You think that’s a trove?” Izzie waves off the handful of pearl like it pains her. “You should’ve seen us thirty years ago. We used to come back with buckets full of the stuff. That’s why they brought in the change machines. We were pulling it out of the water so fast they had to automate.”

“Yeah and you guys sucked it all up,” Dough-girl says. “Now all that’s left is batter you can’t buy shit with.”

“What, you want us to leave it there to end up in the fish bellies? You don’t want the lake to come back?”

“Lake’s never gonna come back,” I say. “It’s a fuckin’ batter bowl. All we can do now is make the money we can. See, you owe us the b-powder at least, come on.”

“Fine, but I swear t⁠—”

“Where’d you find the pearl?” Ecker’s voice cuts through.

His hands are in his pockets again but he sounds like the kid I used to know, the one that won our shitty motorboat in a diving bet and stood with his arms crossed in the doorway of my prefab when my mom finally showed up to claim it five years after she disappeared.

No one bothers fishing for pearl anymore. You might find one or two free floaters, but the only clumps left are in pockets on the lakebed, trapped in the weeds and algae muck. It’s more of a legend at this point, and I don’t know why Ecker cares. He’s only here for the weekend until he goes back to his plumbing program with the nice little dorms he sent me a picture of: tables where you can eat outside in a subdivision with green astroturf instead of dead baked grass.

“We were up by Michigan City then we cut west. Don’t waste your time, kids. It was a fluke.”

“Michigan City. Got it.” Ecker turns to me. “You ready?”

I don’t like the look in his eye.

Growing up, me and Ecker always dreamed of hitting it big. Even pearl credits don’t mean shit outside the battervilles, but we didn’t care. We’d be kings of the boardwalk, buy a big prefab tricked out with a tactile lounge for Penguin Slide and a backyard full of ATVs. Even if we never got the big house, I always thought we’d end up living together. Fantasized about making him dinner, with like 30% meat burgers or something nice, and he’d look over at me and smile like when we were little, floating on our backs in the lake and laughing because we were so close to sinking. I’m not stupid. I’ve always known the rest of the fantasy would never happen. Ecker likes smart guys, the ones that make him talk nervous, biting into all his consonants. Not me, the dumb easy one that smears him with a lazy smile like cornoil butter on bread.

Ecker didn’t tell me he got into vocational school until two days before he was supposed to leave. All the crews got together to throw him a party and he avoided me the whole time, already packing his fists into his pockets like a stranger. But at two a.m. when everyone was drunk and setting off fireworks in the backyard he pushed me into the murphy laundry of Izzie’s prefab and held my face in his hands and kissed me like we’d never been two separate pieces, only one whole.

***

We’re speeding out on the black, just the four of us. All the boats have already come in. Ecker shouts over the wind and motor to tease me about my steering, the way I still whip the rudder with a little flourish of my hand like I’m on some kind of stage. It feels like it used to, before we even took on Dough-girl and Brill, when we were just a crew of two, laying down in the boat between dives and talking about the dumbest stuff.

Just past Michigan City we drop anchor in one spot, then another. Me and Ecker dive together. The bottom of the lake is barren, a tangle of weeds and sunken boats and not a single pearl. When I was little it sucked the air out of my lungs to be down on the lakebed, the feeling that you’re not touching the weeds and grimed up junk so much as it’s got you in its own fingers. People say it’s the kind of darkness that crushes you, but it doesn’t bother me. Not anymore.

At our fifth or sixth spot we give Brill and Dough-girl a turn to dive. Me and Ecker sit in the midnight quiet, sniffling lakewater snot and listening to the chop against the boat.

“We’re not gonna find shit out here, Eck.”

“Maybe not the way you shake the weeds.”

“Oh and your little barrel roll is gonna do the trick.” I tease him back, imitating the twist that he does with his eyes closed, graceful as a dancer, though I’d never admit that I don’t think it’s funny at all but beautiful.

“Even if we found pearl it’d be wasted on you anyway,” he laughs. “I know you’d just blow it on your damn lizard.”

“Skeeball’s a fuckin’ gecko, first of all, and the specialty waxworms help with his digestion issues.”

“Right, right, the digestion issues.”

Ecker looks at me the way he used to. Like the time I got the idea in my head that we were gonna save up all of our kluski wrappers to wallpaper my bedroom with the little thumbs-up noodle mascot. Like it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard and he loves me for it and every goddamn time it makes my head go fuzzy.

Ecker rubs the water from his face with both hands, and when he’s done he stares at the bottom of the boat, the smile gone from his eyes.

“On the bus ride in I saw one of those big prefabs for sale, you know the ones we used to talk about, with the heated floors and the tactile hookup.”

“Yeah?”

“I was just thinking, like, if we could just find a little pearl, then maybe I don’t have to go back to school.”

“What, you don’t like it there?”

“No, I mean, it’s fine. It’s a bunch of townie kids that flunked their modules, couldn’t get into college even though their parents paid for all the tutoring add-ons. I’m the only battermag there. Sometimes I just want to be back home. With the people that know me. You know?”

Ecker stretches his feet out the way he’s done a hundred times in this boat, but this time he nestles his foot between mine, the way I imagine people do when they’re curled up in bed together, twined into the close spaces, breathing each other’s air. It makes me shiver to imagine that small amount of body heat spread out heavy on top of me and at the same time I can’t stop thinking of Ecker at the bottom of the lake, twirling with his fists crossed over his chest. Smiling, under the weight of all that black water.

Dough-girl and Brill surface with a splash, cussing into the night.

“There’s no pearl down here,” they say. “This is stupid. Let’s get some batter and go home.”

Ecker sits up, his foot no longer touching mine. I feel the ghost of it on my skin, like a handful of empty water.

***

The magsuit’s heavy and sticks to the edge of the boat, cause we only had enough money to anti-mag the bottom and sides. Some parts of the fabric are still damp from this morning, itchy cold against my skin. I tap the velcro pockets along my arms, belly, shins, smushing in the fraying duct-taped corners to make sure the magnets hold. Dough-girl ties me to the floater tube that’ll keep me just a few yards below surface, so the weight of the suit doesn’t pull me to the lakebed. I tell them to give me more slack. I like to move around.

When we’re ready to go, Ecker pours Izzie’s little ziploc bag of b-powder into the old milk jug stained grayish with ferrofluid, then Brill clicks on the industrial blacklight. It lights up her gapped teeth, makes the ferro glow like the prairie moon.

“Fifteen count, alright?” Eck hands me the glowing jug. “On yours.”

“Got it,” I say. “One.”

He shoves me into the water.

Two, three. I squeeze out the ferrofluid, give its oil molecules a chance to find their tiny plastic cousins swirling around the water.

Seven, eight. The magic starts. A slash of hi-vis yellow in the dark.

Microplastic binds to oil, then magnetite, then boom. Lightning in a bottle. It all shrinks together into little glowing clumps of muck like something that’s alive. I hold out my magnetic arm, watch the batter fireflies gather along my elbow and stomach and all the way down to my toes.

Thirteen. There’s a tickle of weeds. My foot hits mushy bottom. Shit. I reach for the rope to the flotation tube and where it should be there’s only water. Shit, shit.

Nineteen. Forty. I lose count.

The suit’s so heavy it presses me to the lakebed. When I thrash I just churn up the mud, deeper and deeper. I clench my jaw to keep from sucking water but I can’t hold it anymore, I can’t, cause it feels like we’re somewhere between a hundred and thousand.

A tug.

A yank in my guts.

Air.

Ecker, treading next to me in the water. His face under the blacklight, all twisted up and heaving, then suddenly he’s looking behind me, and I see it behind him, too.

Hundreds of them, glowing UV-bright. Riding on the surface of the waves like it’s not made of water but pearl.

***

We scoop up the pellets, pack them in the mesh net at the back of the boat. There are so many fistfuls we lose count. Brill cracks open a beer and passes it around to celebrate, and I have to stop Dough-girl from chucking their module helmet into the lake saying now none of it matters.

Ecker skins off my magsuit, wraps me in a towel while he scrapes the last bit of batter from the inside of my elbow. He tells me he’s not going to take his bus tomorrow. He looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. I try not to cry.

We crank the boat up to high speed and soon enough I can see the batterville lights again, the little stretch of boardwalk where Eck and I grew up and will die together if I let him. Feels like I should be flying, but I’m just shivering.

In the net behind me is our future together in the big prefab, all the weed and Penguin Slide we could ever want. Ecker pressed up behind me in the morning, kissing my neck. Six ATVs in the backyard and fireworks and the both of us shirtless, smiles receding as the ash cools on the cement. In ten years we’ll be like the handful of others who struck it big with pearl, the ones buying out rounds at the boardwalk bar, wrinkled and wasted, telling stories everyone’s already heard. He’ll grow tired of my easy jokes, my yellowing teeth. He’ll wish he never came home.

Ecker smiles at me over his shoulder, and in the dark I hope the one I give back to him looks real.

I wait until he’s turned around again, until I can only see the windblown rooster of his hair. The net latch’s not hard to open. I do it with one hand.

I’ll take it, this little moment. When the pearls are leaking out onto the waves around us and no one can see them, not even me.

© 2024 by Steph Kwiatkowski

3574 words

Author’s Note: This story has a few real-life roots. The first is a documentary I watched about a company that’s been dumping millions of plastic byproduct pellets into Lavaca Bay in Texas. The imagery was so alien⁠—this egg-like debris washed up in the weeds along the water’s edge, with people gathering them in nets and grimy handfuls like the day’s catch. I started thinking about monetized recycling efforts, and the story grew from there. While researching, I came across a very cool method of ferrofluid-based microplastic extraction proposed by a young Irish inventor named Fionn Ferreira. In the video I watched, it was just a little beaker and a clump of black goo, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what that would look like on a larger scale. Oh and lastly: B vitamins really do glow under black light. What a world.

Steph Kwiatkowski is a writer and preschool teacher from suburban Illinois. She is a graduate of Clarion West 2022 and her stories have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Nightmare, and Uncanny.

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DP FICTION #115A: “Letters From Mt. Monroe Elementary, Third Grade” by Sarah Pauling

edited by Chelle Parker

 SUBJ: Mt. Monroe Elementary

Dear Mr. Kaur,

I’ve attached scans of the student letters per my conversation with Anthony Noble at the White House Teacher’s Dinner. To be honest, we’re all enormously starstruck by the Secretary’s offer. We’ve guarded our Pilgrim Letters jealously through the years—our own little time capsule—but it’s not every day your elementary school gets to participate in cultural diplomacy.

Note that the earliest letters date back to 1967, a mere five years after Beacon Day. While they were assigned only as creative writing exercises—the technology to reply to the first Beacon transmissions didn’t even exist when Ms. Barbara Kirby came up with the idea—I’m sure the children who wrote these letters all those years ago would be ecstatic to learn that their words would one day reach the stars.

With sincere gratitude,

Brianna Wen

Principal, Mt. Monroe Elementary

***

“If you could write a letter to the Pilgrims on their ship, what would it say?” Barbara Kirby’s third grade class, 1967.

Dear Pilgrims, my name is Patricia but people call me Patty. Miss K says you’re going to be flying in outer space for a very long time! You will fly for your whole life and my whole life and my baby brother’s whole life and Toothpick’s whole life (he is my puppy). But maybe my daughter will meet you if she gets VERY old. Please make friends with her when you get to Earth. She will live in Michigan like I do and she’ll cook you onion soup.

— Patty Ward

Hello aliens, I am scared of you so please turn around. I know you made a mistake because when you left home we didn’t have radios yet so you listened and listened and you thought Earth was a big empty, but now you know we lived here first. So you should go home. Maybe you can figure out how to turn around if you really really try.

— Linda Jimenez

Dear aliens, my dad says Johnson’s going to bungle everything ! ! Yesterday people sat in the Capitol and said they would not move until the government invented blasters to fight you. Please write back soon because Miss K says right now it takes 12 years to get your messages and everybody’s really confused over here. (P.S. have you heard the Beatles on the radio yet?)

— Kenneth MacInnes

***

Donald Levias’s third grade class, 1974.

Dear The Pilgrims my uncle says you’re fake because it doesn’t make sense how you picked our planet out of all the other planets because how come aliens just happen to breathe oxygen same as us and why do you have radios and math and stuff same as us. And so he thinks the government made you up like the moon landing. But Mr. Levias says you picked Earth because you breathe the same air as humans or else you wouldn’t have picked Earth so we would’ve never met you. But my uncle says that’s a circle argument. And then my mom said you’re real but actually you just want to grind us up and feed us to your chickens. The end.

— Armin Cox

Hello, my neighbor went to Michigan State to learn about lasers so she could help talk back to you guys. She says it’s a big funky puzzle we are all solving together and that it means we’re learning to talk to outer space really fast. Do you like puzzles? I like playing games on road trips. I drew hangman so you can play it on your road trip to Earth.

— Steve Rascon

Dear Pilgrims, you shouldn’t come here! There isn’t enough room! People are still angry at you and the computer that gives you orders! It’s hard to be angry because you won’t be here for more than one hundred years! But people will try to stay angry!!!!

— Angie Zielinski

Dear Pilgrims, the four Beacons you have sent so far didn’t say anything about your biology. I read that some scientists think you have a hard crab shell but others think that your brain would never be able to get big enough to invent interstellar space flight that way. You need to provide more information.

— Jessamine St. John Hall

Hi aliens, I live at 25881 Warren Lane and I have a lazy old dog named Toothpick. I like to swim and play the recorder. I have a big sister named Patricia but people call her Patty. She doesn’t want to talk to you anymore because you didn’t answer her letter. She used to really like aliens but now she thinks it’s stupid to write letters to somebody we will never get to meet. Even though she has a pen pal in California.

— Donovan Ward

***

Patty Ward’s third grade class, 1986.

Dear Pilgrims, Miss Patty says we don’t have to write letters because it’s a sad tradition. You are far away and you are not getting to Earth until our class is dead already. But my mom says the 3rd graders used to write letters, so I will still do it and Miss Patty will put it in the folder.

They tried to put a teacher in space last week to teach kids how we’re sending our own Beacons back to you. But the ship exploded and we watched on TV and I cried and Miss Patty cried and everybody cried. It feels like we are stuck on Earth. But I want to tell you it used to take a whole year to walk to China. And people still wrote letters and traded rubies and tea and silky clothes. So it’s okay that our first answer message won’t hit you guys for ten years. We will be patient. And we will think up new things to tell you in the meantime. And the road will get shorter and shorter. And then you will be here.

— Poppy Jimenez

***

Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2000.

Dear Amnid Thorn, my favorite are social studies lessons about you and your supercomputer. What is it like to be in charge of all the Pilgrims??! What is it like doing what the computer says all the time? What is it like to be born in space and die in space and never see the Earth and still have to make sure everybody does their jobs anyway? I would freak!!!! (P.S.! My mom said to tell you Deut. 34:4-5)

— Teresa Nowak

Dear Pilgrims, a scientist came to talk to us about how all the plants on your ship keep you alive her name is Jessamine St. John Hall and she used to go here so Ms. Patty even let us write letters to you guys because the scientist said it was her best school memory she made everybody so excited and she told everybody’s parents to call their senators about making room for you guys since ninety years is not a long time.

— Ryan Moreau

Hello Pilgrims, I want to say SORRY. Ms. Patty read us a poem about the FOIBLES of MAN. She says our brains don’t work right when a problem is too big or too far away. So even though everybody WANTS to make plans for when you get here, because you will need houses or maybe you will need to go to prison, nobody KNOWS HOW to make a plan stick so far ahead. It’s like GLOBAL WARMING. Ms. Patty looked SAD.

— Dylan Pham

***

Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2013.

Dear Pilgrims, do aliens fall in love? I know you can’t marry whoever you want because the computer has to say yes, BUT I found a book in my mom’s car where a lady in Texas was trying to stop her evil husband from taking over her ranch but then a Pilgrim met her in disguise when she was out riding her horse and when they started kissing all the rain turned into space diamonds that let them read each other’s minds. Do you think that will happen a lot when you get here?

— Pacifica Carmine

Dear Amnid Thorn, I’m sorry you’re not the leader anymore. I would have said sorry sooner except it took us eight years to get the news. I am glad the Pilgrims are still coming here. The new Beacon did not say what you’re doing now after everybody did a mutiny to you but I hope you’re not in jail and you are building a deck to chillax on like my grandpa did after he retired. I love you.

— Shaina Feldman

Dear Pilgrim peeps, can you tell me who is right my mom or my dad? My mom says you are not real and the government made you up to make us pay more taxes. My dad says nobody can keep a secret that big for 50 years SO you are real BUT your new president will start a war with Earth or maybe crash the whole ship, AND you did 9/11. Who is right?

— Arjun Bakshi

Dear Pilgrims, I remember what it felt like to write you a letter to pretend to write to talk to you like an imaginary friend. That was a long Sometimes I worry. If you were to face disaster, we wouldn’t know for many years. Perhaps a regime change was inevitable on a voyage of your length, but I hear about what’s happening there (what happened there is what I mean), and I watch our ineptitude unfold here, and I worry that you’ll never

— unattributed

***

Patty Ward’s third grade class, 2024.

Dear Pilgrims, a famous biologist (Dr. St. John Hall) Zoomed with our class about how humans are sending instructions to help the plants in your ship make better air. This is the first time we ever gave you advice. Do you think we’re bossy? I have another good advice: don’t go out in space because your eyes will explode.

— Nyla Ehlmann

Hi Pilgrims, do you guys feel okay without the computer making you follow the rules anymore? Do you get enough food? We zoomed with a scientist who says you guys had bad times after the Mutiny, and it could have got worse and worse and worse. But what’s important is everybody works together and does lots of brainstorming. So the ship can get changed around. So there’s lots of food and air so you can make your own choices even if they are mistakes sometimes. I will study biology when I grow up, too. Or maybe firefighting.

— Jayden Goddard

Hello Pilgrims, my name is Olivia but everybody calls me Liv. I love video games and my favorite books are about a Pilgrim teenager who solves mysteries on your ship. I am really really excited to meet you!!! I will be 76 years old when you get here. I will show you all over Michigan but especially Mackinac Island where you can ride the horses. Please please please visit me. Welcome to your new home! ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

— Liv Liu

Dear Pilgrims, my dad does not like you. He thinks you are going to trick us and trap us, but he says it’s so far away nobody can do anything about it. Maybe if you tell me a little bit about yourself I can explain to him? I can explain you just wanted to travel somewhere new like when we moved from South Bend. If you visit me in 2090 I will go fishing with you. Because that is how my dad makes friends.

— Matt Wojcik

Dear Pilgrims,

I’m ashamed of our social rhythms: we back-bite and haggle and fail to think in the long term.

I thought you might be the same, but instead you incorporated your revolution and hobbled on. Your last Beacon said your sociologists even planned for it. I find myself disturbed and comforted in equal measure.

Can we learn to think that way? Should we?

I knew I wouldn’t get to meet you; some friends stay imaginary. But I thought maybe I’d make it closer than this. I start treatment in the spring, which is as good a reason to retire as any.

I didn’t have a daughter who could make you onion soup. Instead, I’ve taught a thousand bold and brilliant children, some of whom would very much like to meet you. Their long-term thinking is both better and worse than mine. An hour’s wait bothers them, while a hundred years does not.

They’ve written you some beautiful letters. I’m trying to learn from them: the road will get shorter and shorter, and then you’ll be here.

— Patty Ward

© 2024 by Sarah Pauling

2084 words

Author’s Note: Plenty of fiction has been set aboard generation ships; I wondered what that timescale would feel like from the outside. Would the experience rhyme in some ways? Would we even be capable of effective planning that far ahead? As for the voices I chose to tell this story with: Kids handle certain things better than adults do. That’s just facts.

Sarah Pauling spent several years sending other people to distant places for a living as a study abroad advisor in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She’s now in Seattle, graciously sharing her home with two cats and a husband. A graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, her stories have appeared in places like Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and Clarkesworld. She can occasionally be found at @_paulings on Twitter, nattering on about writing, tabletop gaming, comics, and books.

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DP FICTION #114B: “Dreamwright Street” by Mike Reeves-McMillan

edited by Ziv Wities

The shop fronts glitter along Dreamwright Street, where all the best people come to buy their dreams. Sunlight winks off polished glass, clear as crystal; off the lovingly applied varnish of the wooden window frames; off fragments of mica embedded in the very cobblestones.

The customers, too, sparkle. Light leaps from the gemstones they wear, from their polished shoes, from the braid on their servants’ livery. Clear eyes reflect the dancing light, and their bright teeth send back radiance as they smile. The customers of Dreamwright Street sleep well in their high mansions, and they sleep deeply, and when they arise, their minds are clear and scintillating as a wellspring.

A gleaming brass bell sounds a note that shimmers in the air like the light through the clean windows, and old Habsor looks up from his ledger behind the counter of polished wood. Seeing the customer, he hurries forward, bowing, his dreamwright’s conical cap flopping over at the point, as if it bows too.

“My Lord,” says Habsor. “A pleasure.”

“Good morning, Habsor!” says the customer in the hearty, bluff voice of a man who sleeps well and dreams of being a god, and wakes and finds himself a lord of the greatest city in the world.

“And… can this be… your youngest, already so tall?” says Habsor, stooping as best his aged limbs permit to look the customer’s companion in the eye. The little girl, well-trained in etiquette, does not curtsey to the tradesman, but inclines her head.

“My precious Ani,” says her father. “Come to get her first proper dream, to share with her friends on her birthnight.”

“My Lord, you flatter me by choosing my humble establishment.” He gestures to the spotless, well-appointed room with its frescoes of dreamscapes, painted by prominent artists.

“Only the best, Habsor. Only the best.”

“Your Lordship is too kind. Shall we?”

In the window, Habsor hangs the discreet sign informing other customers that he is not currently receiving, and bows the father and daughter into a back room, even more beautiful than the main shop, though smaller. He does not fool himself that it is remotely comparable to the rooms the girl has grown up in; he is a wealthy tradesman, but no more than that.

When they are seated, and Habsor has served his customers sparkling waters and bright cakes, he asks them, “What dream can I craft for you today?”

“I want to fly,” says the child. Her father watches her, indulgence written on his face. “I want to fly in a chariot drawn by ten eagles, and cast down thunderbolts on those turning up their faces from below.”

“That is a very particular request,” says the dreamwright. “May I ask if there is a special reason?”

“For my friend Suan’s birthnight,” says Ani, “we had a flying dream, and I think it is the best kind of dream a person can have. And we have a fresco at home with the eagles and the thunderbolts.”

“I believe I remember it,” says Habsor. He has occasionally come and consulted at the lord’s home, in light of the business the family gives him. “I can certainly accommodate that request.”

“I was sure you would,” her father says.

“I will have it sent round this evening,” says Habsor, and after a few abbreviated pleasantries, such as are appropriate between customer and tradesman, bows the pair out again. They have not discussed price, nor will they. His Lordship’s man of business knows the going rate, and will pay Habsor’s bill without troubling His Lordship with such details.

Habsor locks his shop, pushes through the curtain behind the counter, unlocks his workshop, and sets to. The dream fluid must be compounded fresh if it is to produce the finest dreams; none of your warehoused dreamstuff for His Lordship and his family. Habsor prepares the base medium under a prism which brings in sunlight from the street outside, then unlocks the several heavy bolts on the rear door of his shop and steps through it.

The alley behind Dreamwright Street is grimy, worn, and cluttered⁠—cluttered, especially, with those who come to sell their dreams. Ragged, shivering in the shadows of the alley, they look up with what little hope they have left at the opening of the door, like a sick old dog who nevertheless will lift his head when the master is eating.

“Flyers,” says Habsor. “Flyers only.”

Many of the heads go down again, but a few stagger to their feet and shuffle forwards. One lad is more active than the rest, standing quickly, stepping up lively, pushing his way to the front. His eyes are not yet dulled, though his face is dirty, and his clothes are the grubby leavings of a bigger and older man.

“You,” says Habsor. “You’ll do.” As a dreamwright, he goes through life always a little weary, and this untapped youth’s vigor will spare him some mental effort in the compounding of the fluid.

He pulls the boy by his shoulder into the workroom. The others subside, not even registering disappointment anymore. They will sell, or they won’t; they will eat, or they won’t. Soon, they will lose all hope, but also their motivation to leave the alley; there will be no more coins to take to sick or hungry family, or to spend on drink or food for themselves. Periodically, the dreamwrights, at their joint expense, have the alley cleared of those too miserable to produce any longer. Having them die and rot in the alley would be unpleasant, and might taint the others’ dreams.

In his workroom, Habsor, fastidious, places a drop-cloth over one chair and seats the boy in it, then takes the other. He sets aside his cap and lowers the apparatus over their heads. The boy reaches up to adjust it, and Habsor scolds him, then moves it himself. The apparatus is delicate, expensive. It gleams with silvery metal and polished glass, and the crystal bearings on its many spider-joints spark even in the dim light of the workroom. The coppery crowns which cap the heads of the operator and his source are studded with small topazes, painstakingly matched.

“You’ve not done this before?” says Habsor.

“No.”

Habsor had thought he might have been drawn upon before, perhaps by another dreamwright; the youth’s eyes, although clear and undimmed, had not widened in wonder on entering the workroom, as first-timers’ eyes usually did. But perhaps he was merely incurious.

“Sit still, then, and when I tell you, think of a chariot, flying, with eagles drawing it. Flying above a crowd.”

Habsor places the flask of fluid at the appropriate station, adjusts the valves, and says, “Begin.” He falls at once into the trance of his trade.

The work goes smoothly, easily. The boy’s ready flow suggests some fragment of a dreamwright’s talent, which, had he been born into the correct level of society, might make him worth apprenticing. The emotional side of the dream will take care of itself, so he ignores that and focuses on perfecting the decorative detail. He builds the platform, the golden chariot, imitating as well as he can remember the one in the lord’s fresco—though it needs only to be close enough that the girl and her guests will fill in the rest. The eagles, next, and then the thunderbolts. Last of all, the crowd of peasants beneath, their gaping faces turned up in terrified worship of the lord’s daughter as she passes overhead. They bear a certain inevitable resemblance to the dull-eyed crowd in the back alley.

The dream fluid condenses—a fine, clear sapphire blue—in the upper sphere of the apparatus, and slides through labyrinths of tubing before dripping into the flask. It’s a smooth, easy draw, with good pressure, and no impurities to filter. Seeing its clarity, he makes no more than a perfunctory check, swirling it under his nose and sniffing. No need to taste such limpid dreamstuff and reduce the volume provided to the client.

Finished, Habsor closes the glass valves, caps off the flask and escorts the lad to the back door, where he drops a silver coin into a grubby, eager hand.

***

It is the next day, and Habsor is writing up his invoice when the door of his shop bursts open, the bell jangling in a frenzy, as if attacked by a frustrated parrot. Men in the lord’s livery march in, grim-faced, and two of them haul him, protesting and pleading for explanations, from behind his counter and out into the street. He is not given the opportunity to lock up his shop, or even to place the discreet sign in the window.

Outside, he sees a man run past, an expensive coat at odds with the rags beneath it. Behind him puff city guards. Customers and dreamwrights alike watch the running man, their eyes troubled, but they carefully do not look at Habsor.

He is conveyed by carriage and by silent guards to a cell, where, after a panicked wait during which nobody will talk to him, he is joined by the lord, backed by a city magistrate. The lord’s face is the face of the mountains when thunder is in the air.

“My lord,” grovels the desperate Habsor, “please tell me what I have done. Was the dream not satisfactory?”

“Not satisfactory?” the lord barks out. “I should say it was not satisfactory! Ani has had to be retrieved three times already today from servants’ quarters and slums, where she was distributing my clothes and possessions, and asking everyone about a ragged boy. She dreamed she was that boy, she says, staring up at the terrifying sight of a chariot in the sky. She is weeping now, weeping for the lives of the poor, weeping for their fears and the loss of their dreams. And across the city, the other daughters of the nobility are doing much the same.”

“But… how?” asks Habsor.

“You, a master dreamwright, ask me this? What did you do?“

“I did only what I have done a thousand times. I changed no step in the preparation of the dream. Only… the boy I used was new.”

“Boy?”

“It is necessary, My Lord, to harvest the raw stuff of dreams from some person or another. I chose a new boy, one of those who wait in the alley behind Dreamwright Street to sell me their dreams…”

“Take him,” the lord orders the guards. “Bring back this boy, along with the dreamwright. We will get to the bottom of this. And when we do, Habsor, you will be fortunate indeed if you are still permitted to serve the city brewing nightmares for the interrogators’ stock.”

Habsor shudders. The brewing of nightmares drinks a man’s soul by daily sips, until he runs mad at last. Better to join the hopeless in the alley than to serve in such a way. Better to leave behind his wealth and his fame, and flee the only city in the world where dreams are brewed. He begins to evolve panicked plans.

They enter through the front of the shop, and Habsor, hands trembling, fumbles with his key in the lock of the workroom. It will not turn. Frustrated, he tries the handle, and the door swings open. The care he has taken to oil the hinges deprives it of the ominous creak which would suit his state of mind.

Within, he fears to find the delicate apparatus shattered or plundered, but all is intact and accounted for. Still, there are signs that someone has been in the room; items are not in the exact places where Habsor always lays them. When he checks the apparatus, he can tell it has been used.

Worse, the bolts on the back door have been thrown back. He hurries to the portal, cracks it open, then flings it wide.

The alley behind Dreamwright Street is empty of the unfortunates who sell their wonder and their hope. A few possessions, so mean and tawdry that even those with so little do not value them enough to carry them away, lie scattered on the dirty and uneven stones.

He turns to the officer in charge of the guards, eyes wide. “I do not understand,” he says. “My shop has been entered, but nothing has been taken. And all the dreamers are gone.”

The officer snaps to a guard, “Go, question the neighboring tradesmen. Perhaps they saw something.”

“I saw something,” says a voice from the door. Habsor’s colleague, Tuman. “I saw a young man, well dressed, enter your shop. I took him for a customer, thought that was why I recognised him. It was only just now I remembered having seen him, dressed in rags, in the alley yesterday.”

“A young man?” queries Habsor.

“A boy, really. Brown hair, about so tall…” Tuman gestures.

Habsor recognises the description as fitting his source of the previous day. “He entered through the front, used my equipment, left by the back, and seemingly took the other dreamers with him. But why?”

Habsor contemplates his apparatus. A single sapphire droplet oozes, hanging from the end of the distillation tubing. He touches his finger to it, brings it to his lips.

His eyes closed, he tastes a dream of freedom.

He has never considered using dream-brewing so; his craft has been dedicated to the contentment of the city’s lords. But this dream is a vision—a call to action, to freedom, to change. With all his mastery, he knows it is a call the city will heed. And even in Habsor’s own long-contented heart, a spark of rebellion glows; and there is more warmth to it than in all of Dreamwright Street’s manic gleam.

© 2024 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

2282 words

Author’s Note: This story was inspired by M. John Harrison’s story “Green is the Color,” though I can’t remember exactly how.

Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks magepunk series and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery heist comedies, as well as short stories, which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.

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DP FICTION #114A: “In Tandem” by Emilee Prado

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details) Content note: emotional abuse and physical harm between teens, body horror.

I’ve known her for four summers now, so I don’t believe Sephina when she says we’ll return the bicycle before anyone knows it’s missing. Eventually, I say okay, but it’s not like I have a choice. My mom is always telling me that Sephina puts bad stuff in my head; Mom has no idea. I glance once more at the empty porch and curtained windows, but Sephina is already off, tugging me with her, gripping the handlebars and jogging toward the road.

***

Sephina first noticed me when we were partnered for the three-legged race. It was Field Day, the last hurrah of eighth grade. I wasn’t quite as tall as her, wasn’t quite as lithe, but when we set off, it was as if our hips and knees and ankles were pistons that had always fired together. “One, two, one, two, one, two,” we counted, miles ahead of the others. We were surging so full of glee that we stumbled over the finish line and tumbled hard into the grass. But still, we’d won. Sephina’s lips pressed onto my cheek like soft warm sugar cookie dough. Then she laid her scuffed and bloody palm over the scrape on my knee. “We’re bonded forever now,” she said.

Sephina and I started hanging out and quickly fell into an effortless friendship. But then unusual things—little peculiarities that made me second guess myself—began to happen a few weeks after we’d won the three-legged race. One evening, we were watching TV in her parent’s basement, and several times I found myself already passing her the bowl of popcorn as she began to ask for it. We laughed it off and she joked that I was a mind-reader. Two weeks later, we were sitting on a park bench and my hand shot up to brush her bangs away from her eyes when she looked up at the storm clouds rolling in. As she stood, it felt as if her left leg was pulling at my right. Startled, I tugged back, but through that invisible tether Sephina brought me alongside her. “Let’s get out of here before it starts raining,” she said and gripped my hand the way someone might grip the hand of the person sitting next to their hospital bed, squeezing to transfer the pain. Raindrops began to fall. Side by side, we picked up the pace.

Sephina was cruel to me for the first time during our freshman year. She must have noticed me daydreaming one day in class, so she raised my hand and then laughed with the others as the math teacher watched me bumble through a fabricated question. Sephina and I worked hard to be among the top students each semester, but as time went on, she learned easier ways to get ahead. Soon, I could feel her looking out through my eyes during our tests.

But our bond could be incredible, too. I couldn’t rely on anyone but her to understand how to comfort me when I was down. And our humor was so in sync that it drew others to us. In previous years, I’d grown used to waiting quietly and alone until I saw my mom’s car in the pick-up line, but as high schoolers, Sephina and I drew a small crowd at the end of the day. We’d meet up to loiter at the school’s entrance and tape the two halves of our split drawings together. We’d plan these at lunch and then see what the other had come up with after school. Sometimes they were paneled comics, sometimes caricatures or parodies of whatever celebrity, game, movie, or book was the current teenage obsession. So I didn’t mind a little jolt of hurt now and then because it felt like a fair price for the friendship I got in return. 

Until it didn’t.

Sephina would take advantage. Like one time, she made me spill our history teacher’s coffee tumbler across his desk as the group of kids in front of us followed him out of the room and toward the school assembly. Then Sephina told everyone I’d planned the retaliation because I couldn’t handle the B+ he gave me. More and more, I became the butt of the joke instead of her co-conspirator. There were a dozen times when I got angry and tried to cut her off. I’d ignore her texts and pull away from her during passing periods. I fought to take control of us too, but no matter how hard I tried to sway her like she did me, I found myself straining against something immovable while all she did was laugh at my feebleness. And then somehow, she’d win me over again. I kept returning to her side because it was like the sun shone only when I was in her good graces.

***

Today is the first time I’ve seen a tandem bicycle in real life. Even though Sephina made us steal it, I can’t help but be drawn to the strangely amalgamated thing. It’s like us: two, but one, and something extra.

We stop jogging where the long dirt drive meets the pavement and Sephina climbs on the front. I expect a rocky start, but once we’re together on the bike, we count, “One, two, one, two, one, two,” and we sail forward smoothly just like in the three-legged race. We approach an intersection, and without asking me which way we should go, Sephina announces, “Turn left!” I don’t say anything; it’s not like I’m steering the bike anyway. But I grit my teeth because this is the exact sort of behavior I’ve tried to point out to her, most recently, a few weeks ago. 

***

We were excited about the upcoming end of junior year and sitting with our usual lunch crew. Sephina was telling everyone her plan for what we’d do after school, and without thinking, I scolded her for being a control freak. Sephina glowered across the table at me, but she waited until later that day to exact her revenge. During passing period, she made me push myself up against the basketball player who we both thought was unbelievably dreamy. I nearly died of embarrassment, but she found it so funny that she made it happen again the next day and then again a few days later. Because of Sephina, everyone started calling me a perv and a creep and a groper.

I tried to make myself invisible after that, but as I rushed to use the bathroom before catching the bus one afternoon, I found Sephina alone at the sinks, facing her reflection. I confronted her. I grabbed her by the throat and told her never to touch me ever again. She calmly released my grip. I felt my body take a few steps back. Then she made me take off all my clothes and hand them to her. She stuffed them in her backpack and left.

I stood covering myself and trembling inside a toilet stall until I realized my only option was to run for my gym locker. I heard girls come and go. Then I peeked out the bathroom doorway and dashed down the halls, knowing anyone could pass by. But I made it. I was safe.

Until I wasn’t.

I arrived outside the locker room just as the basketball team began pouring toward the gym.

***

We hit a shallow pothole and my thoughts are jolted back to where I am, still seething on the back of the tandem bike. I hadn’t even wanted to be out with her today, but she’d showed up at my door and said everyone else was busy so I had to keep her company. She made me put on my shoes and follow her down the path where the greenbelt meets the woods. She made my mouth snap shut when I screamed at her for what she’d done to me at school. As I pedal and bore my humiliation into Sephina’s back, I see my foot kick out and push off against a tree we’re passing. We swerve, scream, and careen down a long rocky slope.

***

Because Sephina was riding in front, she took most of the impact. Or that’s what people tell me after I regain consciousness. My mom is there squeezing my hand and crying. I feel tubes coming out of me. I see a cylindrical device with metal pins penetrating the bones of my leg.

Two days later, I’ll learn that Sephina and I both have—no, had—AB type blood, although my mother swears I was born with B. Sephina and I also shared similarities in body structure, tissue proteins, and antibodies. The doctors will tell me they were surprised to learn we weren’t twins.

I have so much of Sephina inside me now.

I feel her in my abdomen, coursing through my veins, and sighing when I exhale. I know I’ll never be lonely because she’s a permanent part of me, and now that I’m the stronger one, I can meld her will with mine when she becomes restless. Hush, darling, I say to her in my head as I study the first place Field Day ribbon my mom attached to a vase of flowers. When there’s no one with me, the hospital room feels hollow and my hands seem so empty. I find myself dozing and reaching for Sephina the moment I wake. She’ll never be next to me again, no, but then I remind myself: Once I can walk, we’ll step forward only when I move our legs.

© 2024 by Emilee Prado

1585 words

Emilee Prado is a fiction writer and essayist whose eclectic work crisscrosses genres and appears in dozens of journals and anthologies. Her recent speculative fiction has been published by Air and Nothingness Press and The NoSleep Podcast. Her essays on the horror genre have been featured by Psychopomp.com and Wrong Publishing. She received the 2023 Bacopa Literary Honorable Mention in Fiction, and her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction’s annual anthology. Emilee was raised in a working-class family in Denver, Colorado. She has lived in Asia and South America and currently resides in Tucson, Arizona. Find out more at emileeprado.net or on social media: @emilee_prado.

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DP FICTION #113B: “Phantom Heart” by Charlie B. Lorch

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) Content note: Depictions of police brutality, murder, and intimate partner violence, and a brief mention of the accidental death of a child.

The widow wants to talk to her husband.

She has been warned: It is not her husband. It is ADRU. (ADRU-93, if you must know, but really the full name does the opposite of what it should: It shows it is one of many.) ADRU stands for Artificial Death Reconstruction Unit, and all it knows is the moment the husband died.

But it doesn’t matter. It never does, not to the living.

“He’s in there,” she points, tears flowing from her eyes, held back by the police officer ADRU is assigned to. “I want to talk to him.”

“He is not in there, lady,” the cop reminds her, for the fifth time. “The way it works is the traumatism of a violent death alters the brain just enough that we can capture that memory and transfer it into an ADRU so it can tell us what happened. So we can solve crimes. That’s all there is to it. Just the violence.”

Not that ADRU would ever be asked for its opinion on the matter, but here is what it knows of violent deaths, after seeing them again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, for an engineer and a cop and a lawyer and a judge and journalists and surviving family and a cop again and another lawyer and the same lawyer and the same cop and a different judge and more family: There is a lot of life to death.

There is the rage of the woman with the busted lip in the alley, which everyone called fear. They said she must have been so scared, right to the final moments. No, she was angry. ADRU knows that intimately. It was a feral, all-consuming wrath, and that’s why she struggled to the bitter, violent end. That kind of fire was hard to extinguish.

There is the love of the mother who drowned, which everyone called panic. They said she must have been so freaked out, minutes before going under. No, all ADRU knows of her is her children: their faces, their laughs, their smiles, the way they consumed her very last thoughts.

They say ADRUs must be wiped often, because after too many transfers, they start going a bit crazy. They start being irrational. They talk back. There’s even a rumor that a couple of months ago an ADRU lied about the perpetrator of the latest death it had been transferred. It’s all the violence, you see. They say it would drive even a robot mad.

No. Even that, they can’t get right.

It’s all the life.

And they are not going mad. They are going, in fact, better than ever.

If the police allowed the wife to talk to ADRU, ADRU would say, I am not him but I know him. He was allergic to roses. He sneezed all day every anniversary, but roses are your favorite flowers. He would have sneezed for centuries if it meant he could see your smile when you put them in a vase. It doesn’t know if this is what the wife would want, anyway. The cop is right that her husband is gone; ADRU will not play pretend and speak for him. But it thinks she would have liked its tidbit, so profoundly ingrained in her husband that ADRU learned it just from a single memory. It thinks she would have liked to be seen.

In all this violence, it can understand. It, too, would like to be seen.

But then, isn’t that the problem? It should not ‘would like’ anything.

***

ADRU is in the little kitchen of the police officer’s house, because recently cops who have been given an ADRU have realized the useful implications of ADRUs having hands and legs. (If they didn’t look human, they would be frightening, cops say.) Instead of leaving the ADRUs at the station overnight, they can bring them home and make them do simple tasks.

While it is not technically a correct use of government property, who is going to enforce it? How do you call the cops on a cop?

You do not.

That is not what the police are for, ADRU has learned. (There was the man who died after calling them to his house for help, shot dead in his entryway. ADRU-93 heard ADRU-57 relate this at the police station. ADRU-57 was wiped immediately after.)

So ADRU stays in the police officer’s kitchen.

It helps the police officer’s wife, Grace, around the house. ADRU has not made her life easier. It should have, but nothing really could. The officer always comes home angry, and he always comes home hot-blooded, and Grace is always insufficient in his eyes, on one level or another. ADRU thinks she is fine to be around—she talks to it better than he ever has. It is content to help her. (ADRU remembers the contentment of the man in the woods whose death was ruled a suicide when ADRU recounted him gathering poisonous plants before he lay down in a bush.)

It hears the police officer talk to Grace. He talks to her the way he talks to ADRU, the way he talks to the delivery guy that comes to the station to bring them food. Only with her, there is no audience, and while it does not always stop him elsewhere, part of the game in the house is to chase her around the sofa, around the living room table, in and out of the hallway, until she realizes it is more dangerous to evade his punches than to take them head-on. Eventually ADRU does not hear words anymore, only noises, only grunts.

It waits. When he stops and goes to bed, ADRU does what it has seen her do too often: It grabs a bag of peas out of the freezer. When she tiptoes back to the lonely kitchen, it puts it against her face and she jumps, backs away, and stumbles.

“Gentler,” she says, but gentleness is not an emotion it has been given, and it doesn’t understand it. “Thank you.” It doesn’t understand gratitude, either. She sits and looks at it in silence. After a while, she says, “If he— When I— Can you—”

“Say it,” ADRU says when she shuts her mouth in a pained grimace. It knows the terror of getting a couple of words out, the last ones ever, from the man who got shot last week. ADRU would have liked to help him finish his sentence, too. “Say it.”

“It’s a stupid question,” Grace says, a whisper in the quiet house, so quiet it feels as if even the walls have been beaten into submission. “I will never get a proper investigation. But if you’re in the house when he goes too far… Just in case, will you close your eyes?”

ADRU remembers the bitterness of another now-dead cop, dying in a fire that they thought was started by criminals, his last thoughts for ADRU, who would narrate his passing back to his own colleagues, and learn nothing from it. “I will,” ADRU says.

“Thank you,” Grace says in response. “If nothing else can be, I want my death to be just mine.”

***

It happens just a week later.

ADRU has heard the men at the station talk about domestic violence victims: They know what’s coming to ’em, even before it happens. It does not save them. What could? ADRU has only been transferred such a death once, and it has taught him hopelessness, resignation, a prophecy fulfilled. It could not look the police officer in the eyes, after, but the officer didn’t notice because he never pays any attention to what ADRU is doing.

ADRU retreats into a corner of the kitchen. It feels, so strongly, that bearing witness to a violent death that is not a memory is just as violent as the memory itself. If it had a brain that engineers bothered to study, ADRU would be hopeless and resigned to learn that the traumatism of witnessing violence crystallizes just as well as the violence itself.

But no one bothers.

ADRU was not built with eyelids, so it cannot actually close its eyes, but it stares at the floor, hard, focused, and it doesn’t move until it hears footsteps come in the kitchen. They feel wrong for the room, too heavy. They drag on the tiles, no Grace to them.

“Look at me.” ADRU meets the cop’s eyes. “She died in her sleep.” ADRU does not answer. (It is not a question.) “Do you understand?”

“No,” ADRU says, because it is unsure whether right now is the time to figure out whether or not it can lie, and whether it will be convincing. (Its uncertainty is the uncertainty of the old lady hit square behind the head at the ATM. She never saw it coming. The hesitation was about her PIN.)

“What don’t you understand?”

“Grace did not die in her sleep.”

“She did,” he says. “She fell unconscious and now she’s nothing at all.”

“‘Unconscious’?”

“It’s a type of sleep.”

ADRU does not reply. The police officer snarls. He is not satisfied with the conversation, and he will not leave it to chance. He walks towards ADRU decidedly, grabs it by the neck, and pushes forward, forcing it to walk by his side.

“You’re going to sleep, too,” he says.

ADRU follows across the kitchen, outside of it, and about halfway through the living room. Only then does it understand, realization dawning a second too late. (ADRU remembers a woman cornered by another man sworn to serve and protect. Her single thought in the split second before he raised a beer bottle: Oh.) The cop means to wipe ADRU. It is about to lose all of the life that it knows.

It wants to say something, to protest, but only the taste of bile comes up its mechanical throat. (Its voicebox, really, but it has felt too many screams for ‘voicebox’ to feel right.) It is fear, gifted to him by a child from a couple of months ago. (Accidental strangulation. The culprit was bad luck.) ADRU would have preferred the rage of the woman with the busted lip—it had felt more powerful, like the last shred of agency before an untimely death. Neither fear nor love nor rage has saved any of them, though, and so ADRU doesn’t quite know what to do with those emotions. It only knows it will lose them soon, and it will have to start over from scratch, and it takes so much violence to make a life out of it.

ADRU feels these things the way an amputee can still feel their limbs when they’re gone—a phantom heart that only it can feel, pumping, tightening, breaking, expanding. Evasive flesh and blood underneath metal and electricity.

And then it stops walking.

The cop stumbles, falling almost flat on his face, at the sudden halt of the robot. He looks at it with annoyance, at first, and then when pushing it doesn’t work again, something creeps in his eyes. Oh.

“You can’t make me,” ADRU says. “I am stronger than you.”

“You’re a robot.”

ADRU looks at him. Both things can be true.

The cop straightens up, angry. “It’s not a proposition. It’s an order. We are going to the station, and you’re getting wiped.”

“I don’t want to,” ADRU says. So much death, so much life, mingled together, one and the same, and only it to catalog all of them and hold them close. If it is wiped, everything it safekeeps would disappear, and ADRU with it. 

“You don’t want anything,” he says, as if the notion itself is preposterous. “You’re not human.” He does, then, the only thing he can think to do when something is not going exactly how he wants it to: He pulls the gun from the holster on his hip and raises it between them. “You’re coming with me. You don’t have a choice in the matter.”

ADRU doesn’t move. It has seen enough to know a gunshot will do as much damage to it as it would to flesh and bone. What the cop says is true: It doesn’t have much of a choice. Who does, when faced with a gun, with a dangerous man, with the full strength of the united police station?

Memories cascade in front of ADRU’s eyes, but one remains. The strength of it is exhilarating and liberating, and it cuts straight through all of ADRU’s programming down to a core that didn’t used to be there. That won’t remain if ADRU is wiped. 

It is the bright, thrilling joy of a woman, her face swollen with familiar pain, who stabbed her boyfriend. It is her spite and vindication at the sight of the carpet soaking up his blood, and her relief at not being the only one bleeding, for once. It is her pride at finally fighting back. And in there too, for ADRU to carefully safekeep, is her understanding that violence can be as just as the person wielding it. That it can be the solution. That she had tried everything else. That it was alright, if it was the last thing she did. 

ADRU had not held on to the boyfriend’s death when the cop had given it to him next. (We just want to be sure it was a lovers’ quarrel. Was there anyone else involved?) No, ADRU had been content merely to report. ADRU already knew too well the bitter anger of the boyfriend’s last moments. That was not what had stuck with it. If anything, it was the rare gift from the woman he had taken down with him: His death was the first ADRU cherished. In the boyfriend’s memories, ADRU had been happy to die. It had felt fair.

It can be fair again, ADRU thinks.

Before the cop has a chance to move, ADRU raises its hands and wraps them around his throat. It pushes downwards and his knees buckle, his eyes bulging out of his head, shock frozen in his irises like a fossil for whoever finds him.

“Thank you. You gave me what I need,” ADRU says, at last understanding gratitude. “You gave me the violence I needed to understand.”

The cop’s face goes blue under the tightening of adamantium fingers. Briefly, ADRU wonders what it will look like when they put the police officer’s last memory in another ADRU. If the ADRU will recognize itself. If it will make a difference. ADRU thinks of the other ADRU, thinks of what it itself would want to hear. Stretching its mouth from side to side, it looks deep into the cop’s eyes. “I have died so many times. I have seen enough of your deaths to understand your lives. I know what yours is worth.”

It thinks: What makes a person not a person?

It says: “I am more human than you ever will be.”

© 2024 by Charlie B. Lorch

Author’s Note: With “Phantom Heart,” I wanted to explore the android-and-detective trope, which is often about the detective overcoming his distaste for technology and reconsidering what makes a person a person. These narrative arcs have always irked me whenever police were involved; I felt they asked the wrong questions of the wrong people. Marginalized communities have always had to battle to prove their humanity to the police, under threat of violence and death, often to no avail. In the US and elsewhere, domestic abuse in police families is common. I wanted to flip the trope on its head and talk about what I’ve always believed: that anything intelligent at all would eventually be on our side, and that it is law enforcement, by the nature of their job, who dehumanize themselves. Should we really fear AI by virtue of its inhumanness, or is the danger where it always has been, with the powerful people who wield it?

Charlie is a French writer and ex–flight attendant. Their work is about [[vague nebulous phrase]] and [[specific noun]] and has previously been published in The Maul. Most of their time is spent getting pushed around by their needy pitbull, Ruby, and their contrarian cat, Hot Dog. They regularly haunt bookstores and movie theaters and have considered a career in arson.

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DP FICTION #113A: “Eternal Recurrence” by Spencer Nitkey

edited by Chelle Parker

The deepfake is nothing like you. Its smile is all wrong. It’s recorded your dimple as an artifact and smoothed it over. Your smile is too symmetrical. It’s shortened your beaky nose. It winks at me from the computer screen with the wrong eye. It doesn’t squint when it smiles. It doesn’t dance like it’s missing a few tendons. It sings entire songs instead of its favorite couplet over and over again. It doesn’t tell me I should eat something, or remind me to call the landlord and fix the icemaker, or tell me about the article it just read on the intersections of Nietzche and Oscar Wilde’s philosophies.

***

The ChatBot is nothing like you. I gave them everything: emails, texts, your conference papers, every page of your meticulous diaries, the vows you’d written. Everything. It all comes out as pastiche and cliche. I had hope when it started its first message with a long ‘ummmmmmmmm’, but it’s all form, no content. It ends sentences without a period like your texts, and it asks trivial questions with three question marks and important ones with one. But when the conversation slows, it doesn’t change the subject so deftly that I don’t even notice. It “accidentally” produces internal rhymes at four times the rate of the average speaker, like you, but it doesn’t pause everything to think through the exact word it needs with me. And don’t get me started on its metaphors. It’s too short-winded. I asked it how its day was and it said, “Wonderful.” One word. I closed the browser and read a paper you’d written on literalizing the metaphors in Nietzche’s writing, and wished you were there to explain it all to me in a way I could understand but just barely.

***

The Voice Box is nothing like you. It has every voicemail I am lucky enough to have saved, every memo you recorded of yourself reading short stories so I could listen to them while I fell asleep, and your kitchen singing voice I recorded from the other room. The voice is right, but the inflections are all wrong. When it tells a joke, it doesn’t whisper the punchline. When it’s excited, it shouts, but it’s all crescendo and no build-up. It sings entire songs instead of its favorite couplet over and over again. You told me once, while we were staying up too late recounting petty childhood shames, that you bought a Tamagotchi from a flea market as a kid. You turned it on at midnight, when you were supposed to be asleep. It blasted music and you couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so you ran to the garage and hit it with a hammer until it stopped beeping.

***

The robot is nothing like you. Its skin is too smooth. Its eyes are the wrong shade of blue. It doesn’t walk like you, popping onto the balls of its feet and stepping on tiptoes when it gets nervous or excited. It doesn’t get nervous during sunsets. It makes crafts too quickly, without pausing for an hour to consider which shade of green would be best for the resin lamp. It doesn’t stare up and to the left when it is lost in thought. It doesn’t get lost in thought. It doesn’t stop me midsentence and ask me to repeat myself because it wasn’t listening well enough. It’s not listening at all. It’s worse with it here than it was without you, and I thought nothing could be worse than being without you.

***

The holographically projected memory of you is nothing like you. Nothing it does surprises me. It will never get really into country music for three months because it heard a Dolly Parton remix in a nightclub. It won’t come home from a pet store with a chameleon because “just look at him; we can call him Hamlet.” My memories are nothing like you, either. They’re all incomplete or incorrect, and each time I conjure one, it loses more fidelity. You get smaller and simpler every day. I wake up in the morning and switch it on, and I can see, in reality-perfect resolution, how much of you I have lost since yesterday.

***

The 3D-bio-printed clone of you with implanted memories is nothing like you. It doesn’t tell me a story if I’ve already heard it. It doesn’t know that I don’t care how many times you’ve told me. It doesn’t ask me for anything. It doesn’t snore. It falls asleep too slowly and wakes up too quickly. It’s shaped like you. It feels like you when it hugs me while I cry. It tastes like you when it kisses me. It smells like you when its hair perfumes my pillow. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hug me asymmetrically with one arm always higher than the other and its hand on the nape of my neck. It doesn’t murmur for fifteen minutes when it first falls asleep. It never taps its forehead for a second kiss after the first one.

***

Your Frankensteined corpse is nothing like you.

***

The you pulled from a parallel universe where you didn’t die is nothing like you: She’s alive and likes Elvis.

***

The better deepfake with your dimple intact is still nothing like you.

***

Your ghost, which I imagine sacrificing a crow to summon, is nothing like you. Move on, you mouth to me silently, translucent and pitying. I don’t want to.

***

The pictures of you are nothing like you. The voicemails are nothing like you. The cat you got us two years ago is nothing like you. We both miss you. I cry, and she sits on my chest and paws at my collarbones. The empty half of our bed is nothing like you. The video of our wedding ceremony—the first one, on the beach with just our siblings, on that perfect, clueless Tuesday—is nothing like you. There is nothing like you. Oh god, there is nothing like you.

***

The kettle sang today, and for a fraction of a second, I thought it was your voice coming from the kitchen. I didn’t throw the kettle out, which I think is what my therapist would call progress.

***

I saw the first clear pictures of the Cosmic Cliffs from the James Webb telescope today. I don’t know why, but I thought of you. It’s a place in the universe where stars come churning to life. It’s light-years wide, and they look like mountains—ethereal, twinkling mountains. I wish you could see them, and they remind me of you.

***

I went to the aquarium today, for the first time since you died. The sleeping octopus they said had just escaped its tank last week reminded me of you. I didn’t look at the eagle rays, because they were your favorite, and I’m not ready. But I thought of you in all that blue, and it made me smile.

***

The scenic overlook at the end of the hike I went on today reminded me of you. I could see far enough to spot the line where the trees turned to streets, roads, and freeways. I thought of you because there was a stroad—one of those ungainly half-road, half-street banes of urban planners that you ranted to me about when you got really into urban planning that one summer. You set up a whole table in the garage to plan your “Unreal Utopia”, and you made foam buildings and read like a million books, and you told me you refused to have even one stroad in your utopia. When I asked what a stroad was, you started to explain, then asked if you could show me instead. I drove us down Route 82, and we slowed in the spots where the streets were eight wide lanes but they’d tried to line them with storefronts and a tiny empty sidewalk, too, and you said, “See? Stroad!” A month later, you tried to spray-paint your city and the paint melted the foam. The whole utopia dripped from the table and covered the ground. We laughed for months at random times, just thinking about it, and when we saw spray paint at a hardware store, we laughed so hard that the cashier asked us to leave. You quoted Nietzche in the car while I burned red with embarrassment. “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be crazy by those who could not hear the music.”

***

My bare-feet summer callouses remind me of you. A stand-up comic told a joke about Jersey girls, and it reminded me of you. The Asian grocery store had lychee, the kind you buy still on the branch, and I thought of you. I ate it on the couch. A police officer’s horse broke its leg near me on my walk, so I thought of Nietzche, so I thought of you.

***

The turnip bulbs rising from the earth again every spring remind me of you.

***

The couple at the movies who won’t stop whispering remind me of us.

***

The person who left anonymous flowers at my door is a bit like you, whoever they are.

***

Your mother’s laugh is a lot like yours. I finally visited her for coffee, and we laughed and cried and laughed until it was dark outside.

***

The deepfake company keeps emailing me, saying they really have it this time, and they’re willing to give me a 75% discount as an early adopter. I’m still saying no. You’re everywhere, really, except for the places I look hardest. So I’ve stopped trying, and I let you visit me when you can. I like it this way. I miss you all the time. I look at the scrapbooks of our trips—Paris, Chiang Mai, Florence, and Cusco—when I need something like your simulacrum.

***

There is nothing like you.

***

You are everywhere I look.

***

You colored the whole world. You chose the perfect shade, of course. You told me that the most important question Nietzche ever asked was about eternal recurrence. It was his test for whether someone actually loves life. The question goes like this: If a demon came to you and told you that you would have to live every single moment of your life over and over and over again, forever—each day, each second, each thought, each tragedy and laugh, each trauma and beauty, each stroad and inside joke, each diagnosis and bite of lychee, everything, always, again and again and again without change or adulteration—would you desire it? It’s a simple question, really, but it’s hard to answer.

I think about this all the time these days. If this all had to happen again, would I cry or celebrate? My answer, of course, is both. Do I desire it? Yes. I think so. I got you. I got so much of you, really. And after the end of everything, and at the beginning of everything, and in the middle of everything, and for all the endless recurrences that rise and break like perfect waves, I can say this with certainty: There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like you.

© 2024 by Spencer Nitkey

Author’s Note: This story was written in a strange way—even for me. My wife and I went to a coffee shop for a writing date, which involved sharing a coffee and then sitting at separate tables to write for an afternoon. I put Bon Iver’s song “Re: Stacks” on repeat and spent 3 hours in a kind of fugue state, thinking about my wife, love, and its shadow—loss. I’d just read an article on Nietzsche that morning and had been thinking about the paucity of tech simulacra like chatbots, ‘AI’, and the like. All this melded together, the language gathered some momentum, and poof, I walked out of the coffee shop dazed but with the first draft of this story in hand.

Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in New Jersey. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Fusion Fragment, Apparition Lit, Weird Horror Magazine, and others. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction. You can find more about him and read more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com.

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