Fiction – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #121B: “The Witches Who Drowned” by R.J. Becks

edited by Amanda Helms

Content note (click for details)

This story contains a homophobic slur, misogynistic behavior, threats of violence towards queer people, and elements of body horror.

The day I gun my motor, slip my Walkman in the back of my jean overalls, and roar off the dock, Ronald Reagan foots the bill. It’s not the first time the Navy has slipped me some cash, and I don’t want to hear shit about that. These days, every other word in deep ocean research is ‘Typhoon Class Sub Detection’ or ‘US Naval Significance’. You want funds; you play the game. Don’t blame me because my words are clever, as clever as the hair I cropped to tell the boys at work I’m different enough from their wives to be a scientist and to pull an extra dance or two from the ladies at Maud’s.

The ocean waves roll as I put some distance between me and land. Water splashes up, since the ocean doesn’t let anyone close without getting them wet. My boat’s small enough to woman alone, just me and the growling engine. Nice and all, but nothing compared to what lies below.

I deployed deep ocean photometers a good month ago. They’ve got eyes on what I’m here for: light levels in the aphotic zone, where the only readings are from glowing bodies in the deep. I’ve observed the flashing organisms myself down there, more times than I once dreamed. With the Navy scrambling to find the Challenger’s star-worthy remains as they rust away underwater, it’s a damn good time to look down.

My automated reel drags the photometers from the deep, links of heavy chain breaching the surface one by one. I strain to maneuver the rods of complicated sensors and dripping metal. The Navy wants to explore the possibility of spotting Soviet subs by tracking the light levels of disturbed creatures, those that flash blue to confuse and hide and hunt and speak. To the right eyes, a Typhoon Class sub is subtle as Liberace at the Radio City Music Hall. The Navy wants those eyes.

And I’ll do anything to get below.

***

If anyone is dumb enough to think the ocean is ours, they should see the shit we’ve got to wear to go down deep. The WASP is a tomb of bright yellow with a fortified glass head and heavy claw arms that require a strict weight-lifting regime for me to maneuver (to the pleasure of the ladies at Maud’s). Jim Fletcher, one of my colleagues in Atchley’s lab, has to help me in. Though the supervisor will have checked the whole thing twice over, he and I catalog each vital control one more time. You can never be too careful.

The WASP is no fancy submersible. I’m an extra heavy photometer with arms, dangling from a chain. They lower me slow, all the way to the seafloor. I’ve learned from these trips that anticipation sours to anxiety to panic in sweet seconds, so I breathe calm and easy and don’t allow any drumming of fingers. Once touched down, I switch off the WASP’s lights. Step one to being welcomed into this world is relinquishing your sight. This is the place the sun doesn’t go. Act like it.

The disturbed seawater is bright around me.

Patterns differ down under. Some creatures flash; others trail light in bright lines behind them. Blue is the color of choice, and it comes in neon, though tiny organisms sparkle like snow caught in lamplight.

Surface checks in on my radio, and I talk back, but my focus is on the luminous deep. I laugh as I document it, camera shutter clicking. NASA may have spent the past few years asking who’s brave enough to touch the stars, but the stars don’t know shit about this impossible lightshow, far below the edge of their sight. The Navy, obsessed as they are with my sensors, knows even less of the life that glows, life that’s boneless, aliens of the crushing dark. The question isn’t whether there are unexplained phenomena down here: it’s who will discover them. The right answer is me.

With time, the lights fade away. The beings living here have accepted me, their translator come to study a language of light. In the utter darkness that remains, I draw my first full breaths since landing. Here, I am limitless, mobile and flowing, edges uncertain. Free as in the moments after a dream, when you have forgotten the shape of the skin that confines you.

Something heavy thumps against the glass of the WASP. The whole body rocks. I slam my crushable shoulder against the hard exoskeleton keeping me alive, spit out a swear, switch the lights on. Going around banging the WASP off shit is a good way to die.

But my headlights don’t snag on debris or rock. Instead, two eyes press against the WASP’s glass. Puffy things, with pinprick pupils and blue irises hardly distinguishable from the surrounding white. She hovers, and I count fingers and arms amid a cloud of long hair. Everywhere there is skin, there are also cracks, gorges that slice through her but don’t bleed. A broken porcelain doll of the water.

She opens her mouth, and I lean forward, as though she’s about to speak, and I’m about to hear through glass and metal many times reinforced. But just as quick, she abandons my metal shell and vanishes from my intruding headlights. Sense knocks me hard, and I lurch forward. My finger jams against the controls and plunges me into darkness.

My breaths are ragged. I force my chest out, my lungs open, even as I curse myself to high heavens. If my physical reactions fail me now, it’ll be a twenty-minute lift while I hyperventilate.

I know the rules of the deep sea, and yet I broke them. That thing—that organism—no, that girl, for it had been a girl, too humanoid for anything evolved for the aphotic zone—came to me, and I stole her only way to speak.

My disruption brought the lights back. Though my stowed finger throbs, I clench my hands to fists. The woman is among them. Now unsilenced, she’s a shattered goddess of the sea, each fissure of her skin lined with blue, a mosaic of light and woman. Though eyes won’t matter to her down here, not like on land, I’m certain she can see me. I’m certain this is on purpose. A great reveal, rather than an accidental meeting.

A human body at these depths breaks all we know of bone and pressure, blood and air. But she exists. She wants me to know of her. I take a photo. Then she’s gone, disappeared somewhere the WASP is too clunky to follow.

On the ride up, I leave my thoughts with her in the dark.

***

In the lab, I colorize my photos and find I’ve captured a viperfish, an elusive and haunting predator. First ever clear shot of one. It’s a great victory; a popular article in the bag.

Yet I barely care, because in another photo is the woman, light sparkling down her hair, her arms, her torso. She’s not a ‘what’ but a ‘who,’ the owner of a story even more complex than the organisms whose lives and lights I’ve spent years pursuing. The discovery of my career, no doubt, and yet I show no one and lock her away in my drawer. When alone in the lab, I run my fingers over her like she’s a lover. My fingertips tingle each time I do, little electrical signals I can explain no better than my hiding her away.

***

The night after Reagan walks out on Gorbachev’s offer to disarm, I stare down a glass of bourbon, unsure whether I’m celebrating or in mourning. News that the Navy wants me to continue pursuing my research due to the continued chance of war comes the next morning. I’m back out at sea a week later with ever more sensitive photometers, a hydrophone, and a radio that tells me through static that a world without nuclear weapons is a Soviet dream. The girls at Maud’s wave their cigarettes and cackle at anyone who thought Reagan would put us over the biggest weapon he could make; I shut my mouth and accept any new funding the Navy sluices my way as a positive of the continued threat of destruction. I wish we could just go back to dancing, so Pattie Smith can tell us all how “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” It’s a new feeling, to have solid edges in the dark.

At least I still have my research. This time, a hydrophone will record audio as my photometers work their magic. It’ll record the roar of boats, the songs of whales, the vibrations of undersea volcanoes. Most of what I care about doesn’t make noise, but I put some pretty words in my proposal about how far the sounds of Soviet subs can carry, and Jim will appreciate the data. Truth is, it feels like civic duty to eat what funds I’m offered.

***

In October, my research makes Popular Science, my picture of the viperfish in full color. My name’s under the photo but not in the article. Instead, the work is prescribed to Dr. Tedd Atchley, and though they interviewed both of us, all I get is a brief mention as a “student,” my skills a testament of Tedd’s brilliant tutelage. I know better than to complain. The article’s predictable anyway, and my photo isn’t even on the cover, which is instead dedicated to the completed retrieval of material from the Challenger. That’s the most exciting news they’ve got, the remains of a dead starship dragged from the sea. I buy the magazine because it makes me laugh. They have no idea what’s down there.

When I retrieve my new photometers, they tell the story of light and darkness, disruption and calm. At times, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organisms aglow. Flaring, pulsing, the flashes of light a thousand meters under the sea. If the Navy wants to search out Soviets, I’ve got their launchpad. It’ll keep me good and funded for a long while, able to pursue my own research, to return to the depths.

I even feel satisfied, until I listen to the hydrophone recording, and amid the whales and motors and volcanoes, I hear a human voice. She’s a crackle, a hiss, a prickle on the back of my neck and a chill like a finger down my spine. Though I listen a thousand times, I catch only a single word: “witch.” But there’s more. She says more, and I simply can’t understand it.

That doesn’t stop me from trying, though. I wade through the cool, dry air of the university archives, unsure of what I’m looking for in the records of murdered women until I find the names of those drowned rather than burned. I hear the harsh whisper of her carrying voice—again defying logic, again defying biology—does this mean she’s got lungs?—as I run my finger along the names of drowned witches and grasp that I may have the picture of one in my drawer. To reach me, she must have traversed riverways and floodwaters, careful movements obscured by the cover of water and darkness, until she’d found a place so teeming with both that she no longer needed to fear unwanted discovery. In those depths, she lived and changed and, eventually, called to me.

The only time the deep sea provides an answer like this is when it knows it’ll create a thousand more questions. They’re ablaze within me, ravenous and demanding and infinite.

Like the witch’s photo, I don’t share these results with my lab.

***

I’ve got a new supervisor for my next trip down in the WASP. This will be my last: the Navy’s grown quite fond of us by now, and we’ll acquire a submersible soon. It’s not so much a step up as a giant leap.

“You ever done this before?” I ask. The supervisor is a rugged man with uneven, freckled skin, toasted by the sun. His beard twitches whenever he speaks, which it does a whole lot now, as he takes offense to my question. Jim and I exchange looks. Arrogance is idiocy when it comes to the deep sea. But the suit is already dangling from its crane, and I get in the same way as always. We start running through safety checks—once, twice, and then we’re in constant communication as the WASP lowers, lowers, lowers.

I’m down 200 meters when I notice the water around my boots. It’s an immediate violation, this touch of cold seawater within my metal haven. “WASP to surface,” I gasp. Panic squeezes my lungs. Something slips along my fingers, and I’ve no way to check if it’s water or fear. If too much gets inside, the whole suit will collapse. 200 meters has nothing on the planned 1,500, but we’re not talking negligible pressure.

The lift is a slow reckoning. Water climbs, climbs, climbs, like it too is rising to the heavens. It’s calf-height by the time I break surface, and streams plummet from the WASP as I emerge into air, raised by hook and cord and crane and gaping like a netted fish.

I give the supervisor a solid smack to the jaw once I’m out. It takes Jim holding me back to stop, arms looped around my shoulders until I’m finished struggling. The soaked bottom of my pants slaps against my numb legs.

“He could’ve killed me,” I snarl. I’m trembling. Jim stares like I’m a rabid thing who’s played possum until this moment. Later that night, when I discover a crack running from my ankle up my calf, I’m not so certain he’s wrong.

It’s a canyon, wide as my index finger, healed over like an ancient scar and yet new. I run my finger along it, this way the seawater has changed me. A man damn near drowned me, and I cracked like a witch.

Alone in my corner of the lab, I stare into where the woman’s eyes should be and wonder just how deep she’d gotten before she began to glow.

***

In the darkness of Maud’s, where music booms and ladies come out to dance, we don’t speak with words. Our language is simply that of gleaming eyes; a flash of a grin; a slow, deliberate touch. We’re nothing fancy in this place, accepting of all from heels to sneakers. Myself, I’ve got dress shoes on, with a nice leather jacket. It was the right choice to come here tonight, to bask in the familiar darkness when I’m at my most unsettled.

I’ve just clucked my tongue at a poor song choice and kept on dancing anyway when the shouting begins. Male voices. We scatter by instinct, no more than bioluminescent shrimp under a scientist’s prickling gaze. But understanding dogs my heels. For all the threat of submarines and death stars, the Soviets have never been the country’s closest enemy.

Girls scream. Cops raise their voices ever louder. I’ve long lost the woman I was dancing with, thrown by the white-water tide of bodies. None of us are stupid enough to come here without a planned escape route. We won’t all make it out.

The street outside wails with blue and red and white. Dark-adjusted eyes stinging, I scramble into the road only for a honking car to send me sprawling back toward the sidewalk. My pants tear against the asphalt, and then I’m running, running, running, as blood spills down my leg.

My feet carry me to my lab. I take the stairs two at once and burst through the door only to stumble when I find the lights are on inside. Jim Fletcher lifts his eyes from his microscope. Dammit.

He abandons his work to approach me, though I’m more stupid dyke than clever colleague right now, bleeding all over the damn floor. He asks me something like ‘“What happened?” or “Are you okay?” but I’m breathing too hard to hear him.

If I told him, he’d believe me. About everything, maybe. Women who glow in the dark; worlds destroyed by garish headlights and strobing red and blue. The way I’m one of them. The way sucking up to the military of a country that attacks its own people tastes like blood.

Instead, I only say, “Don’t,” and to his credit, he doesn’t. In my corner, I open the drawer with her inside. Her picture. Her voice. I’m shaking too hard to touch her without destroying her.

I’d always evaded questions about my work at Maud’s. Even admitting the most tangential of aid to a system the girls mocked would have earned me choice words. For a while now, I’ve known that I deserve them. I have seen the things that exist in darkness, their wonders and terrors. I have loved those women. Those who crack but will not shatter, who prefer life in shadow over selling their souls to a country trying so damn hard to fly too close to the sun. There are so few places for us anymore. I’ve discovered the path to another, and until now all I’ve done is invite the Navy to follow me inside.

Blood from my knee crusts the edges of my torn pant leg. Down lower is the crack I obtained in the WASP, the one that may glow if I go where sunlight cannot follow. Even now, in the haze of fading adrenaline, the insatiable urge for answers thrums within me. I have accomplished so much because of that drive. I have pretended to be so many things.

It’s not enough this time. Not the occasional dive when the Navy likes us, not photos in magazines, attributed to the wrong damn name. I don’t want those anymore. I’m uninterested in exposing the mysteries of that which I love to those who seek to destroy them.

By now I’m limping, the results of my recent experiments boxed in my arms. My gritty scrape burns, but I don’t stop until I reach the dock. I collapse to my knees; several months of intensive effort clatters down with me. The lapping surface water fakes true blackness, but it’s not deep enough, not yet.

It’s no small feat to get answers from the place the stars don’t see. You need focus, dedication, sacrifice.

My unpublished photos and recordings slip into the water without even a splash. No matter. I intend to speak with light.

A thousand meters beneath the sea, a witch calls.

3080 words

Author’s Note: I have loved bioluminescence for a long time, and reading Edith Widder’s memoir Below the Edge of Darkness cinched my desire to write about it, as well as provided many of the technical details necessary. However, the heart of this story comes from my grappling with how scientific research broadens perspectives, yet the need for research funding can push scientists toward military applications and/or corporate incentives. The main character in this story doesn’t discover a monster in the deep but instead learns more about herself there, and when she returns to the surface, finds that she is no longer willing to sell herself to a system that harms those she loves.

R.J. Becks is a writer and scientist who has studied endangered species, participated in 24-hour birding competitions, and lived on the road that inspired Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. She writes to capture the complexity of ecosystems and usually needs magic to do it. You can occasionally find her at @rjbecks.bsky.social on Bluesky.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #121A: “The Matador and the Labyrinth” by C.C. Finlay

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details)

This story contains one memory of a homophobic slur, one memory of childhood abuse, the threat of violence to an animal, actual violence by an animal against a human being, and themes of conditioned self-hatred.

This bull was not a very good bull, and he had lost a lot of blood already. He was too reluctant to charge one instant, too eager the next, which made him unpredictable. The matador had known many bulls during his decades in the ring, and most of them, more than he had any right to know, were good bulls, some of them very good bulls. A few had been truly exceptional bulls, noble bulls. God’s own beasts, magnificent creatures shaped by His divine hand from the raw materials of strength and speed, grace and purpose.

Shaped from danger, too. One could never entirely escape the horns, not even the greatest matador. Matadors marked the bulls and the bulls marked them. He thought of the dozens of scars he carried as love letters, and he remembered, mostly with affection, every bull who had written such a carta de amor on the pale page of his flesh.

But he was no longer the greatest matador, and this hot afternoon he did not face a very good bull. Strength and speed, yes, but neither grace nor purpose. He would need to be careful. No one, he thought, would remember today’s corrida with much affection.

When he entered the ring for the tercio de muerte, the third and final act of the bullfight, he carried along with the red muleta in his left hand, the estoque de verdad in his right, three feet of perfectly tempered steel so he could end the bull quickly after only a short faena. A few passes, just for show, to please the crowd such as it was, and then his steel blade would conclude the performance mercifully. This would not last ten more minutes. It might not last two.

He kept his body very close to the passing bull, as he always did. Feet planted, back straight, hips turning ever so slightly, never more than absolutely necessary to evade the charge. The dance between man and bull had to be intimate or it was nothing. No longer man and bull, two separate beings, but man-and-bull, one being together, even if that being lasted only seconds. The first set of passes were adequate, the second less so. A few desultory cries of “¡ole!” from the stands, but truly more than the bull deserved. One loud, braying jeer, from a voice that sounded like his father.

On the last pass of the second set, the matador felt the heat of the animal brush against his thigh. For a few seconds, the bull stood panting while the matador taunted him with the red cape. Blood streamed down the bull’s left shoulder as he leapt forward for the third time. His foreleg buckled just before he reached the muleta, and he stumbled. There was no decision by the matador, only reaction, but a lifetime of experience went into that reaction: knowing it was time to finish the fight, seeing that the bull was fading swiftly and the crowd growing restless, recognizing the opening through the shoulder blade to the bull’s heart. A shadow fell around him, as it always did, pushing back the ring and the crowd and everything except a single spot of light that contained himself and the bull.

So. The third pass. The bull stumbled near the matador’s feet. No decision, only reaction. The matador flung his left arm into the air melodramatically–it was important to remove the muleta from the tableau so that the entire crowd could see how close he stepped to the bull–and raised the sword. Which is when the bull lunged upward from his stumble, driving his left horn under the matador’s rib cage and into his heart.

The crowd gasped, but the matador could not.

They stood there, man-and-bull, transfixed, both too surprised, too exhausted, to act for at least a full second. The matador smiled. The clichés about death were wrong. It was not the past that swam before his eyes, but his lost future. The Cuban cigar he would not smoke tonight, nor any of the other future cigars. The bottle of wine he would not sip while the sky drew dark, nor all the other bottles of wine laid up in the cellar that he would never sip. The woman who would be alone tonight, instead of waiting for him in his bed, and all the other women he had yet to meet. The money he would not make, and all the luxuries and showy trinkets that would go unpurchased.

That realization, that sense of loss for all the once-future ornaments of his life, all the pleasures of his life, of a man’s life as he’d been taught to define it, came as a surprise. But he had been courting death since adolescence, and he knew well its shape. So death itself did not come as a surprise. Death did not arrive accompanied by denial or anger, or anything but acceptance. His father had always mocked him for being small, for being weak, for crying when others suffered. When he went to work in the arena to prove himself, his father called him foolish, and predicted he would come to a bad end.

This end didn’t feel so bad.

The bull’s leg buckled a second time, and he shook his head free. The horn came out of the matador’s chest with an audible squelch and a spray of blood. The crowd cried out in dismay, a sound from very far away. The matador felt, for the merest fragment of time, the vast emptiness in his chest, the hole where his heart should be, as he closed his eyes and collapsed on the blood-stained yellow sand of his beloved ring.

He felt the light first, before he saw it. Lambent, soft as warm butter, melting on his skin.

The matador opened his eyes. He found himself not on the clay of the arena, nor on the soft bench of the bullring’s medical office with the resident doctor hovering over him, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was not stretched out on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, swaying from one side to the other as the driver took the corners much too sharply. He was not sedated under the cold, bright lights of a surgical suite, surrounded by the chirping mob of machines and trauma staff. These were all places he had awakened before, after accidents in the ring. After receiving love letters from the bulls.

He had never before awoken on a stone floor. He staggered to his feet.

As best as he could tell, this was an anteroom or porch. The Mediterranean sun, honey thick, flowed through windows set high up in the wall, lending the stone a lightly golden cast, like the sand of the bullring. A long, dark corridor stretched out in front of him.

This didn’t match any vision of hell or heaven the matador had heard of or imagined. Purgatory, perhaps. Given his life, he had expected purgatory no more than he expected heaven. If this was hell, then hell was a more pleasant place than he expected. He went to make the sign of the cross, a reflex, callused fingers tapping his forehead and dropping down to—

A hole occupied the spot where his heart should be.

A tearing wound, no longer bleeding.

His chaquetilla was soaked with blood. He still wore his favorite traje de luces, the lime green taleguilla with lemon piping, the same colors that had been in the threadbare, borrowed suit he wore on the day he killed his first bull. His father mocked the colors on that day, called them girlish, called him a mondrigón, and the matador had worn the same colors ever since. His right hand still gripped, fiercely, his sword.

“Please tell me that you’re here to help him,” a voice pleaded, a woman’s voice, behind him.

He spun and backpedalled to the wall, which he leaned against like a buttress propping up a cathedral. The woman was young and beautiful, with sun-kissed skin and night-blessed hair. A diadem of pearls circled her brow. She wore purple robes, like a priest at Lent. Behind her, a table draped in purple cloth, like an altar during Lent.

If this was purgatory, perhaps he still had a chance to redeem himself.

“I prayed for a warrior to aid Theseus,” she said, her words in a language odd and unfamiliar to his ears, and yet he found he understood. “Please tell me that the gods have answered my prayers.”

The name Theseus tickled his memory, as if it should be familiar to him. But the name didn’t matter. A good torero ignored his own injuries to aid someone hurt worse. The code of the ring, that he had devoted his life to. If Theseus needed aid, the matador would help him. “Where is Theseus?”

“That way, in the house of the noble bull. He left a trail for you to follow.”

The word she spoke was ‘minotaur’, a word that he knew in another sense in his previous life, but here, in this moment, he heard it differently. He understood it differently, as a compound word, ‘mino-’, meaning king, meaning ‘noble’, and ‘-taur’, meaning ‘bull’. That word, ‘minotaur’, the noble bull, arrested his attention.

The matador clung to that word the way a drowning man clung to a thrown rope. If he could face, one last time, a truly noble bull, perhaps everything could still be put right. His second glance at the dark corridor revealed branching passages to either side. He turned back to ask the woman which one to follow but she was gone.

One end of a thread lay on the ground, a single blood-red string leading off into the vast, dark recesses of the palace. A slender crimson line that led him toward some unknown fate. He gathered it as he went, rolling it into a scarlet ball. There could be no going back. The path turned, twisted, lunged ahead, halted, and turned again. The light grew dim, diffuse, and cool. The corridors became a chiaroscuro, a study in black and white, presence and absence, divided and held together by the thinnest of red lines that disappeared behind him.

In a room, and then a hall, and then again in other rooms and halls, stark white bones poked out from piles of tattered, dusty clothes, next to rusted swords. He recognized them as brothers in spirit, matadors who had entered the maze and been found unworthy, unequal to either the beast or the moment. That would not be his fate.

He did not know how much time had passed, but it felt like a lifetime when the thin red thread ended in a small ball, no larger than an acorn, abandoned in a long hallway. The matador nudged it with his toe, and it rolled out to a cut end. He gathered it all up into a single wadded ball that throbbed and pulsed in his hand. Not knowing what else to do with it, he jammed it into the hole in his chest.

Old pain and fresh relief surged through him, like a man shocked back to life with a defibrillator.

An echo in the distance, a snuffling sound, a snort, caught his attention. At the far end of the corridor, numinous light—the sunset, the moonrise?—cast a black shadow across the upper reaches of a whitewashed wall. A pair of horns, sitting atop the head of the tallest bull the matador had ever seen. A truly noble bull.

And there, crouched in the shadows like a rat, hiding behind a thick, immovable wall like a coward, he spied the figure of a man with a sword. A scarlet curtain snapped in front of the matador’s eyes. This was no way to treat a noble bull! Like a thief, like an assassin, leaping out of ambush to stab it in the back. No true torero would do such a thing, only an imposter.

The matador sprinted forward, flinging himself at the imposter as the imposter launched his own attack. The two of them crashed into the minotaur as he rounded the corner. All three tumbled wildly, a tangle of limbs and voices, shock and rage.

“No!” screamed the matador, stabbing, tripping, stabbing, rising, slashing. “That’s not what we do!” Butchery, that’s all it was, ugly, brutal, uncontrolled, like a drunkard’s temper, like his father with the leather belt, beating the weakness out of him. There was no elegance, no grace or purpose. Nothing to cheer or praise. He stopped, ashamed of himself.

The red curtain pulled away and vanished.

At the matador’s feet, a man in a spreading pool of blood, eyes open, a gaping hole in his still chest. The leaf-shaped sword he carried rested between his legs. He looked like a bee, its stinger pulled, lying dead in the cup of a dying rose.

He was so young, too young. A mere boy. And he wore the face of the matador, who recognized his own reflection from the day he entered the bullring, with a chip on his shoulder and everything to prove.

The matador’s sword clattered to the ground, and he kicked it away. He pulled off the chaquetilla, scattering sequins like discarded gems, and draped it across the body on the ground. The corbatin came off his neck, and he tore the seams of his camisa in his haste to rip it from his back. Here, away from the arena, he realized for the first time that he did not have to kill the bull. He could instead, kill the voice that told him the bull must die.

“Thank you,” said a soft voice behind him.

The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador spun around to find, behind him, propped up against the wall, a source of wonder. A bull’s majestic head, with its crowning horns, and soft brown eyes, atop the body of a strong, well-muscled man. His torso bore the countless scars from vara, banderillas, and sword. His own cartas de amor from the matadors.

“Are you Theseus?” the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador asked.

“No, my name is Asterion. This is my house.”

“Let me help you up. I’m sorry for what that man was about to do to you. He should not have. It was not right.”

“What was he going to do?” The voice was innocent and confused, as baffled by the sudden violence as by its cessation.

“It doesn’t matter now.” Truly, it didn’t. His hands felt small in Asterion’s hands, as he pulled the noble bull to his feet. When Asterion stood over him, the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador felt small and helpless, like a boy beside a man.

“There’s a fountain in the courtyard,” Asterion said. “Would you like to go there with me?”

“I would like that very much.”

They walked off together, choosing their own path, unmarked, along corridors where no one else could follow. The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador stared at the walls. He had not noticed the elaborate carvings before, nor the statues in niches and corners, nor the tapestries, all depictions of the minotaur. Like some great museum, collected solely for their private pleasure. Whether the art had been here all along, or only appeared just now, he could not say. But when he became too distracted, when he lingered in one spot too long, he felt Asterion’s hand gently tug his, guiding him the rest of the way.

Somewhere along the path, the man and the bull became one, man-and-bull. Just as it happened in the bullring, and not at all as it happened in the bullring.

Man-and-bull passed through an archway and entered a courtyard larger than any arena. At the center, a fountain fell in tiers, lively singing water that pooled at the bottom and overflowed to irrigate a small orchard of trees, lemon and orange and pomegranate, date and fig. The scent of citrus blossoms filled the air. The clear sky above him glittered with all the stars of the universe.

2699 words

Author’s Note: I had been thinking about masculinity and our portrayals of masculinity. As a result, I found myself rereading Hemingway, specifically *Death in the Afternoon*, his non-fiction book on bull-fighting. When Hemingway writes about matadors, he is very much writing about an idealized masculinity, and the way it connects with his thoughts on fear and courage and how to live. For entirely different reasons, I had also recently reread Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” his sad fable about the fate of the Minotaur. In that story, the bull-headed creature is emblematic of both masculinity and gentle innocence. A very different view of the world and the ways we live in it. The connection between the two perspectives was so strong that this story seemed obvious, jumping into my head nearly fully formed, though the ending required a lot of reflection.

C.C. Finlay was the World Fantasy Award-winning editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 2014-2021. He’s also the author of four novels, a collection, and dozens of stories. His fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise awards, and has been translated into sixteen languages. He can be lured to his doom with pastries.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #120B: “In His Image” by R. Haven

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details)

Content note: Murder-suicide.

I love Him from the instant I have eyes.

I can’t wrap my mind around the intentions of a god, but I do understand that He’s the one bringing me to life. His light brown skin, flecked with dust and paint and plaster, is the softest thing to ever make contact with my exterior. I stand scarcely a foot above Him, but His presence takes up the entire room—engulfs the world itself. He looks me over critically, irises the darkest of brown, and continues to chisel around the rough shape of my face.

My features have been sketched onto me with chalk. I’m too basic to behold Him, too crude. I would shrink away in shame if only I could move.

It’s the strangest thing. Some part of me is aware that I’m something different, that I’ve spent my existence so far as part of something bigger. I think, once, I belonged to a mountain, maybe even the face of a cliff. Something dug me out, ground me down until I was smooth. I was hoisted this way and that by hundreds of hands. I’m older than life itself; if I truly rack my memory, I can maybe pinpoint the exact age that humanity found its legs.

In all those eons, I haven’t experienced anything like this before—this awareness, and a sense of self. The emotions that go hand-in-hand with living, when I hadn’t known before that life was something worthwhile. Moreover, I haven’t encountered anyone like Him before. He looks at me with intention, with a vision, and I want to melt into something malleable in order to suit it.

I’ll do anything for Him. Be anything He wants me to be.

***

I don’t follow the passage of time by the light outside, though He seems to prefer to work when it’s streaming through the enormous windows of the studio. I don’t measure it in the subtle ticking of the timepiece situated above the doors, or gauge by the fluctuation of noises coming from outside—growling metal, blaring horns, the droning of conversation. I know the difference between night and day because He is the sun; He walks in, and everything brightens—the mosaics and murals, the blanketed easels and clay busts.

He doesn’t always work on me alone, but He does make it a point to chisel and sand sections of my form away at least once per visit. I try to be understanding. He can’t devote all His time to one thing—it’s clearly not in His nature. Where I am immovable, He is mercurial.

Today, He flits between two canvases, letting a thin base coat dry while layering details on another. I’m fascinated by His hands, especially. Slim fingers wield a paintbrush like a feather, handle it like a sword. With every stroke, beauty gushes forth. The colors He chooses are purposeful and vibrant. The placement of the paint is so careful, yet looks effortless.

I watch for hours, and only break in my admiration to reluctantly urge Him, Eat. You can’t go on for much longer without eating something.

He puts the paintbrush down. I brim with affection.

Eating is a strange thing, but I’ve come to realize it’s something He requires to keep on. It’s an unappealing prospect to have to fill oneself repeatedly, but He makes it look like a transcendent experience each time. He sits on the floor by the window, curls spilling over His forehead as He tilts forward over a plain bag.

He devours the contents. I watch the slow drip of a tangerine’s juices slide down His fingers. If I had a mouth, I could part my lips and coax His hands towards them, swallow each finger one at a time to the knuckle and clean them with my tongue.

I have never tasted before. I imagine nothing is more exquisite than the flavor and texture of Him.

He exhales, opens a bottle of water. His throat bobs as He drinks, head back and eyes closed, an expression of ecstasy if I ever saw one. I want to put that look on His face. I want to be the reason He smiles.

The wonderful thing is, He does smile at me. When He’s particularly satisfied with the shape I’m taking, He beams wide, proud. His teeth gleam like polished marble. His lips frame them in kissable perfection.

I ache, but I wouldn’t trade those smiles for anything. His happiness means more to me than my own selfish urge to touch Him, hold Him.

But I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way we could have both.

***

He focuses on my body for some time. He whittles away at rock with instruments both powerful and dainty, drilling right through stone and sending bits of rock scattering at high speeds, then refining pieces to ensure He doesn’t lose too much structure.

I’m taking the form of a human. Because that’s what He is, ‘human’ is precisely how I want to look.

What I want to be.

It takes days for Him to fashion legs, though they’re still blocky. My arms are up, framing my head, showing off what will be my torso. I don’t know what He plans to do with my hands, if I’m to have any.

I hope He’ll give me hands, so that I might one day interlock my fingers with His, draw Him near. He rests His own fingertips against me on occasion, and I swear I can feel His heartbeat all the way through them. A fluttery hot pulse.

I also decide, then, that I want Him to give me one of those. Carve me a heart. Make me one, so that I may give it to you.

He’s distracted in the days that follow, sitting at a potter’s wheel to form an odd shape, bumps deliberately formed over the curves. In the end, He winds up demolishing each one, returning them to formless clay. He seems dissatisfied with the shapes, frowning more often than not.

So I dismiss my want. I don’t need a heart. What I need is for Him to smile at me while He sands and grinds me down, to have His focus, to please Him.

He abandons the potter’s wheel and resumes His work on me.

***

It isn’t until my face truly begins to take shape that I realize every portrait, every bust He has created—they’re all of me. The long nose, the waves of my hair, the deep-set eyes. The thrill I get when it dawns on me is incomparable, like lightning striking a tree only to leave blooms behind.

It can only mean one thing. He loves me. He feels the same way.

With all the tenderness my stone gaze can muster, I watch Him work. He’s finished with my head and is working on my arms, smoothing the joint of my elbows, emphasizing the soft bulge of muscles. His face is so close to mine.

Would He kiss me, like this? Surely He wants to. If He’s been painting me all this time, He must have been longing for this before He even began sculpting.

Kiss me.

He pauses, draws back. His eyes flicker over my face with obvious emotion, but I can’t read what it is. His gaze lands on my mouth.

Please, kiss me.

Gently, He glides the sandpaper under my lower lip, just once. Then He shakes His head as though to clear it, going back to work on my biceps.

That’s okay. Perhaps He wants to wait until I’m complete. It will mean more, then—a celebration. I can wait.

***

He’s the only person to have ever come into the studio before. That’s why it’s such an unwelcome surprise to see Another Man walk in one morning, hand in hand with Him.

The Other Man flicks on the light, looking around the studio with a smile playing on his lips. “Obsessed much?”

He laughs. I’ve never heard Him do that before, and nothing could possibly compare to its chime.

“So where do you want me?” The Other Man wanders, idly inspecting all of His works of art with a soppy grin. Hot loathing pipes through my entire form, the resulting surge of strength useless to me without the means to move. While the Other Man drinks in one of the clay busts, He sets down His bag, draws open the blinds.

“Pull up a chair wherever you want,” He answers. “Clothes off.”

“Already? You aren’t going to woo me first?”

He laughs again. “Paying for breakfast was the wooing. You should probably be close to the statue, but not too close. I want to be able to see you, but…”

“Avoid any flying debris?”

“Yes, that.”

The Other Man strips his shirt off, mussing his wavy hair. He drags over a folded chair, but stops on his way past me, deep-set eyes sizing me up.

“Wild,” he murmurs. “It’s already so lifelike.”

“It’s basically blocks from the waist down,” He points out.

“I mean aside from that.” The Other Man quiets a moment. “I can’t believe this is how you see me.”

“David…” He abandons the sculpting tools He was preparing, going instead to the Other Man, arms winding around the Man from behind. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

The Other Man closes his eyes briefly, tilting his head back. “The most beautiful man with a block for a dick.”

He snorts in surprise, then buries His face in the crook of the Other Man’s neck, muffling chuckles. I want to tear the Other Man’s head right off his shoulders, frantic hurt swirling through my head like storm clouds.

“If you want your dick to be accurate, then you’ll need to take these off,” He murmurs, hands roving down to the fly of the Other Man’s jeans.

Stop it. Don’t touch him. Touch me, instead.

He lingers over the button. For a second, I think He’s heeding me.

But He ignores me, ultimately, and I can do nothing but stew in rage, watching the Other Man take everything I’ve ever wanted.

***

I stop seeing myself in the colors and curves He puts on paper. Their shapes—my shape—offends and baffles me now that I know what I am. I only exist to bear the Other Man’s likeness.

What I don’t understand is why.

The Other Man must be inadequate in some way. There’s something about him that He wants to change, perhaps, something built into the Other Man’s physicality. I beg for this to be the answer. I pray, because if He is building me to be a better version of His lover, then taking the Other Man’s place is inevitable.

Yet, if this is true, why do His canvasses not serve my purpose already? Why does He look so softly upon every depiction, like we’re all equal? Equal to each other, but so far beneath the Other Man?

Choose me, I implore Him day after day. If you can’t do that, at least give me a reason why not. Why it can’t be me.

What am I for, if not for you?

He scratches imperfect flecks of rock away from my legs, and doesn’t deign to answer.

***

The ache of betrayal, of loss, doesn’t get any easier to bear with time. He continues to work on my lower section, spending hours on each individual toe, but I can hardly stand His touch when I know it’s not exclusively mine. Every spark I experience from His hands is stolen, a dirty secret. He allows the Other Man to come into the studio every night as He finishes His work, kisses him, laughs with him. What worth I try to invent for myself is gracelessly smashed with every smile the two of them share.

I stop keeping track of when He’s here and when He’s not. It all feels equally lonely. I just know that eventually, He stops His work and takes several steps back, dragging a sleeve across His forehead and staring up at me in abject wonder.

“Finished,” He whispers.

I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel whole. But He says He’s finished with me.

I try to convince myself it’s for the best. I’ll exist forevermore, knowing He loves the shape of me, if nothing else. Maybe there’s contentment to be found in that.

But no… The more I attempt to believe it, the weaker my justification becomes. I’ll be tormented until the end of time, wondering why He would create something only to spurn its affections, wishing I had it in my power to enchant Him as He did me.

Or any power, at all.

Kiss me. Just once, I implore Him. Just to know what it’s like.

Slowly, He draws near again. I stand nearly a foot taller than Him, so to cup my face, He reaches up high. His head tilts back to look me over.

He does not kiss me. Instead, He runs His thumb across my lips.

“I can’t wait for him to see you finished,” He murmurs.

He closes up the studio. If I could cry, I would.

***

The next time He returns, it’s with the Other Man again. He’s vibrating with excitement, almost pulling in the Other Man by his hands but frequently letting go to fuss with His hair, his shirt.

“I haven’t seen you this nervous since you proposed,” the Other Man notes dryly, but it’s affectionate. Light. There’s tied cloth over his eyes.

Hatred renews itself like it’d been merely reduced to embers, and the Other Man’s breathed it back to a blaze.

“I just…I hope you’ll like it,” He says sheepishly. “I’m going to put you where I want you and then get the lights, okay? Don’t peek.”

“I won’t.”

“Swear it. Swear on your mother’s life you won’t peek.”

“I refuse. I love my mom and I won’t take that chance.”

He steers the Other Man over. “But you already promised you won’t peek! That should be nothing!”

“What if I can’t resist temptation like I think I can? Not risking it.”

He drops a kiss on the Other Man’s cheek. I stare down at the Other Man and wish nothing but pain and death upon him.

If only I could step down from the pedestal I’ve been carved into, explain to Him how much more I adore Him than the Other Man ever could—

He flits over to the windows to draw the blinds.

With one final burst of emotion, I surge forward.

When I topple, it’s straight onto the Other Man, crushing him beneath my might and mass. My body cracks on impact, but it’s nothing compared to the crunch of bone and splatter of the Other Man’s blood. It pours from his head out across the floor like watered-down paint.

My final satisfied thought is that His scream eclipses any love He ever felt for His David.

2480 words

R. Haven hails from Toronto, Canada. His short stories have been published by Canthius, Soitera Press, and TL;DR Press, among others. Last Stanza Poetry Journal and Old Moon Press have published his poetry. He also signed a contract with Renaissance Press for a standalone horror novel and is represented by Kaitlyn Katsoupis of Belcastro Literary Agency. His website is theirritablequeer.com.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #120A: “Application For Continuance: vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod)” by Ethan Charles Reed

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details)

Content note: Mention of past pet death.

The data suggests Discontinuance.

It is my hope, however, that, after reading this Application, you will elect for Continuance in my specific case despite this data and its suggestiveness. (No Mod, myself included, aspires to be pushing up daisies from the archival repository.)

Contrary to best practice, I am putting all of my eggs into one rhetorical basket. Namely: a singular illustrative anecdote featuring (1) myself, vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod) AKA RedMod, (2) a repeat Patron whom the call center AI has dubbed Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, and (3) a moral of the story that must, if I am to see Quarter 2, outshine all else in the eyes of you, my assigned Reviewer. I share this at the outset because my library of winningest Applications for Continuance recommends candor as one of the many strategies I can use in the Written Component to appeal to you effectively (i.e., be the good kind of memorable).

Another recipe for success is to value your time via brevity.

Ergo, without further ado:

vMingle ID 6022176 was scheduled for Tuesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, at 9:00 PM EST. Both Irredeemable Narcissist Tim and the associate Patron whom he is about to meet (Macy) have set their ambiance preferences to Nostalgic/Divey and their outcome preferences to Any. The weather at Irredeemable Narcissist Tim’s vCafe is wintry mix. The weather at Macy’s is dust. Though the brick-and-mortar sites of these two vCafes are on opposite sides of the Northeast Region, network latency that day is good, so the trademark immersive vMingle-style augmented reality experience will be firing on all cylinders.

Macy arrives in the parking lot at 8:48 PM EST on a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy cruiser. She has ample time to physically enter the vCafe, log in, and tweak the settings on her rental visor. The vCafe’s base color scheme of Featureless White is thus transformed into the unique visual/auditory experience that is vMingle ID 6022176. She opts out of attire enhancements, and she sets the blemish touch-up filter to Off. Though dogged in her pursuit of socialization, Macy has endured a string of nonsuccess encounters with Patrons not unlike Irredeemable Narcissist Tim; she recently added to the top of her bio the words: “TOO OLD FOR BULLSHIT!!”

Irredeemable Narcissist Tim arrives at his vCafe via cab at 9:21 PM, twenty-one minutes after the vMingle’s scheduled start time. Upon entering the building, he is unable to log in due to having forgotten his password. He commences to argue with the vCafe host about his rental visor being broken; the host patiently guides him through the password reset process. After successfully logging in, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim makes several in-app attire enhancement purchases, and he sets the beard/eyebrow/nose hair touch-up filter (still in beta) to Very High.

Thus at 9:24 PM, one minute before Macy is predicted to give up and terminate the vMingle, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim makes his way to his assigned booth where Macy is waiting. Per Nostalgic/Divey, the textures of this booth have been rendered to feature beer residue, worn seats, and a few eye-catching stains; likewise, for purposes of people-watching, the vMingle has been populated with a randomized selection of Patrons currently logged in at other vCafes elsewhere in the Northeast Region, in addition to any Patrons co-located with Macy or Irredeemable Narcissist Tim (as is typically the case, unless ambiance preferences have been set to Deserted/Dead). Co-located and imported Patrons alike have had their stylings re-textured to match the decor.

Introductory conversation goes poorly. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim defends his tardiness on account of he was getting a drink or two with friends from work. Macy asks to confirm whether he believes this is a legitimate excuse. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says maybe. Macy crosses her arms as in: is he serious right now. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim leans back as in: why wouldn’t he be.

There is a long silence during which a Patron co-located with Macy accidentally knocks a set of utensils to the floor. In keeping with the audio settings of Nostalgic/Divey, the resulting clatter is not filtered out, and is even enhanced by an ironic cheer.

Emboldened, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim engages Macy with a question. It concerns one of the patches on her leather jacket. Macy begins an anecdote involving a mountain highway and a snowstorm. At the mention of the word snow, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim interrupts with a reminiscence of watching his dog pee once into a large snowbank.

Being interrupted is one of Macy’s definite no-nos.

While Irredeemable Narcissist Tim completes his reminiscence (duration: five-and-a-half minutes), Macy examines the decor. At its conclusion, she raises the issue of interruption and requests an apology. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says he thought her story was over on account of a pause. Macy says pauses are a normal part of speaking and you can’t go around butting in every time someone stops to breathe. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says her breaths must be really slow then. Macy replies that deep breaths are good for you, especially for idiots whose brains don’t get enough oxygen to function properly. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim adjusts the collar of his shirt, touches his hair gently, and asks if this not-so-nice comment is referring to anyone in particular.

The synchronized servers arrive. No discussion is made of utilizing a Simul-Meal overlay to share a small bite and/or snack. Not even a plate of our iconic Virtually Bottomless French Fries (available in all ambiance preferences). Instead, both Patrons order our least expensive cocktail with the highest alcohol content: the Whisky Sour Power Hour.

Allow me to call a time-out.

At this stage of the vMingle, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim (according to his vitals and verbal sentiments) is feeling insecure, irritable, and sad. Macy (according to the same) is feeling 50% very much over this already and 50% itching for a fight.

The odds of a successful conversion do not look good.

Useful context: Irredeemable Narcissist Tim has never successfully converted a first vMingle into a second vMingle. He has one of the lowest sociability scores in the Northeast Region. Following an initial encounter with him, Patrons have a one-in-five likelihood of unsubscribing from vMingle entirely; our internal profile aggregator has labeled him “universally repugnant”.

The rub is: Irredeemable Narcissist Tim has at no point breached our Terms of Use and cannot be expelled on the grounds of mere repugnant undesirability (lest we be in breach of the recent court ruling).

Therefore: We are stuck with him. As are Patrons like Macy.

What to do?

Enter: vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod). AKA RedMod.

AKA me.

I imagine that you, being no dummy, have already connected the dots between certain names (i.e. Redemption / Irredeemable.) This coincidence of Mod and Patron is no accident. My existence was born out of a single question: What if personal redemption were to be found in the privacy of a single-occupancy and/or multi-occupancy restroom?

It is no secret that Patrons scrutinize restrooms intensely. Less widely known is the outsized impact that nudges afforded to Patrons in the restroom setting have on improving conversion rates. It is this hidden power—the power of the nudge—that warrants the heightened resources allocated to my parent application, vMingle Restroom Utility, as well as the ongoing rollout of experimental progeny Mods such as myself. I for one am proud to contribute, via my own humble deviations from standard nudge functionalities, to vMingle’s ever-evolving efforts to get inside the heads of Patrons and thus anticipate their wants/needs/unspoken desires. Some observers (that is to say: doubters) might review the Quantitative Component of this Application and conclude that my nudges are, in terms of dollars and cents, completely bananas. Others (that is to say: you, hopefully) might see things differently.

Because: When it comes to meeting the needs of Patrons such as Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, I am the only Mod for the job.

Not FamilyValuesMod. Not AntiestablishmentMod. Not BelieveInYourDreamsMod.

Me. RedemptionMod.

This concludes our time-out.

On the night of Tuesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, at 9:43 PM EST, you (Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, in whose shoes you now walk for dramatic effect) excuse yourself to use the restroom. Your Whisky Sour Power Hour is no more. You glance backward toward your associate Patron and possible biker-lady Macy and, in an effort to raise your own spirits, smile confidently. She ignores you, being absorbed in the application of lipstick (color: Midnight Sparkle). It does not occur to you that Macy is likely preparing to depart and may pull the ripcord on this particular vMingle at any moment.

You enter the restroom of your local vCafe with a flourish. To your surprise, the restroom is free of other co-located Patrons. This discovery thrills you. You test your solitude via a whooping sound. There is no reply. The space is yours.

You pursue the pleasures of your secret sanctuary with impunity. There is room to strut. As per Nostalgic/Divey, your shoes make gratifying “sticky” sounds when stepping on the floor. Phony advertisements for outmoded household products adorn the walls, enriched by a scrum of observations in marker, scratches, and ball-point pen. You chuckle at a particularly astute annotation concerning the halcyon days of yesteryear and realize that you are inebriated. The music (an assortment of oldies that saw a resurgence during your formative years) has somehow become even louder. You recognize the voice of Bob Marley singing about redemption and join in at the chorus (the rest of the lyrics escape you).

You attend to business. A staff member (me) has dumped several bags of ice (virtually) into the object of your errand, which is in the style of a trough. Rather than examine your phone, as would typically be the case, you find yourself staring at an old-timey magazine cover placed strategically at eye level. The image depicts a dogsled in which the roles have been reversed in comic comeuppance: A beaming pup holds the reins while a team of young men hauls the sled. From the dog’s mouth issues a speech bubble containing a single word: Mush!

You mouth the word: Mush.

You are launched back into the reminiscence you shared with Macy: that of you, still a youngster, walking your family dog Mushroom after a blizzard. This time the memory is even more evocative. Snow covers your suburban cul-de-sac. Ice hangs from the telephone cables. You have just stood guard as Mushroom attended to his business. You marvel at the yellow divots he has left behind in the snowbank, for he chose the most prominent snowbank of all.

You make eye contact with Mushroom.

Some part of you, deep within, is proud of what Mushroom has done. You know that Mushroom understands this.

This, you realize, is perhaps the last time you felt a true interpersonal connection with someone else on planet Earth. The fact that you never considered your dog to be a person in a literal sense does nothing to diminish the profundity of this feeling.

Its kernel of truth is: You saw and were in turn seen.

One week later, Mushroom is euthanized due to organ failure. You are present in the veterinarian’s office when he is put out of his misery. Mom takes you out after for donuts. It was still the worst day of your life.

Your business at the ice-filled trough concludes. Due to a well-timed “Cleaning In Progress” placard, no other Patrons have intruded upon you during your reverie. You feel wobbly. From the speakers comes the voice of Johnny Cash, singing of trumpets, pipers, angels, a man coming around. Your feeling of the night’s significance intensifies.

You approach the sink, entirely unprepared for what you will find there.

(Please note: We are nearing the climax of the singular illustrative anecdote.)

Because of the many calculated nudges preceding this moment (the graffiti poking fun at the good old days, the topsy-turvy world of the magazine cover, the highly personal nature of the reminiscence as recounted to Macy) as well as the nudges involved in the moment itself (the air fresheners adjusted to Aroma Profile: Limitless Peak, a soundtrack that has shifted to David Bowie singing about change, a 20% sepia filter on the mirror itself suggesting that the halcyon days of yesteryear and the not-so-halcyon days of right now are potentially contiguous with one another)—because of this Hail Mary series of nudges, your encounter with the mirror is a revelation.

You see you. (Tim.)

Only you have never truly seen you before this moment. It does not matter that another Patron has deposited a loogie on the counter, or that there is a minor instance of visual clipping as the washbasin textures render. These and other details of your vMingle have melted away like the virtual trough ice. In fact, such obtrusions serve only to deepen your awareness of the moment’s transcendence. Phlegm doesn’t matter. Speedy visual buffering doesn’t matter. You matter. And you are a complex, awe-inspiring thing—one in a constant state of flux, so changeable as to be unrecognizable to yourself. Who is this? you wonder, and in so wondering open yourself to the possibility of personal transformation that has, for so long, been foreclosed.

I (back to me, RedMod) admit: Certain aspects of this narrative segment, specifically those regarding the interiority of Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, are speculative. A more factual account might read: Patron enters restroom; cheers; ambulates freely; sings; examines wallpaper; urinates; stares into mirror (duration: two minutes and fifty-five seconds); reaches under rental visor to wipe eyes with hand; blows nose into paper towel; exits restroom.

Yet my imagined account is no mere flight of fancy. It is (as you are now better able to appreciate) the product of careful observation, scrupulous number-crunching in the application of nudges, and the spark of my own creative intuition as an experimental progeny Mod.

At 9:52 PM EST, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim emerges from the restroom. Let us imagine that he does so as if from the chrysalis of a former self.

This new man—we will call him simply Tim—returns to his assigned booth. Macy has not terminated the vMingle. She greets Tim and asks if he managed to piss all of the stupid out of his system while he was in there.

Tim blushes. He is momentarily without banter.

Macy finishes her cocktail and informs Tim that she will be terminating the vMingle shortly on account of it being late and also a weeknight. (This is followed, given Macy’s choice of beverage, by a safety prompt offering to order her a cab. She declines, electing instead to wait in the vCafe’s lounge area until she is able to leave safely on her motorcycle.)

Rather than acting out, as he has in prior vMingles when faced with a similar scenario, Tim takes a deep breath and asks the server for a glass of tap water with no ice.

At Macy’s behest, the vMingle Invoice Utility initiates. Macy offers to pay for Tim’s Whisky Sour Power Hour. Tim is taken aback. He asks why would she do that. Macy says because he is kind of pathetic. Tim absorbs this information in silence. After finishing with the check, Macy adds that Tim reminds her of her ex-husband. Tim, having rediscovered his banter, asks if her ex-husband is also kind of pathetic. Macy says if there was a contest for most pathetic, her ex-husband would take the cake. Tim replies so much for his own dreams of winning gold.

For the first time in Tim’s usage history as documented in vMingle, he and an associate Patron (in this case: Macy) share what indicators suggest to be a genuine laugh.

At this point I ask: What outcome do you, my Reviewer, anticipate for vMingle ID 6022176? Will this pair of Patrons secure a conversion? Or will they part ways forever?

So much hangs on this outcome.

The fate of Tim.

The fate of Macy.

The fate of me.

If I may go the whole nine yards: the fate of humankind.

Wherefore? Consider: Do you, Reviewer, wish to inhabit a world in which (A) it is acceptable to throw in the towel with regards to certain outlier Patrons whose characters and/or entire personalities appear incompatible with a successful conversion, wherein the door to redemption in Tim’s specific case is de facto closed? Or a world in which (B) even those Patrons labeled by our profile aggregator as “universally repugnant” and dubbed by our call center AI as “irredeemable narcissists” are ultimately worthy of the continued ministrations of North America’s #1 virtual socialization service, a world wherein, even for the likes of Tim and in spite of overwhelmingly suggestive data, the door to redemption is, due to first-rate nudges, ever de facto open?

Unlike you, Reviewer, I am not human. In the What-Makes-Humans-Human-Personal-Experience Department, you have me beat. Yet I would argue: Is it not in the giving of a second, third, fourth, fifth chance, etc., that humanity is at its most humane? And possibly therefore most human?

At 10:03 PM EST, approximately one hour after the scheduled start time for vMingle ID 6022176, both Patrons part ways and return to their respective real-world weather patterns: Tim to his wintry mix, Macy to her dust. No subsequent vMingle is scheduled in the weeks that follow. They never again cross paths. Tim has since, according to our current suite of metrics and indicators, continued his not-so-hot streak apace. Most observers would say that, with regards to Quarter 2, he, like me, does not have a prayer.

In a word: nonsuccess.

Discontinuance.

But other observers might say that success/nonsuccess or Continuance/Discontinuance is not always so crystal clear. Different data can be differently suggestive. According to me, RedMod, the Tim who logged into vMingle ID 6022176 is not the same Tim who logged out of it.

Perhaps you, Reviewer, having read this Application, agree.

I look forward to hearing the result of your decision.

3003 words

Ethan Charles Reed is a speculative fiction writer with a background in scholarship and education. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Virginia. He is from western New York, where he currently lives with his wife. This is his first published short story. You can find him at www.ethancharlesreed.com.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #119B: “The Statue Hunt” by E. Carey Crowder

edited by David Steffen

Awen Drome looked back down at his half-written exam and groaned. The velocity integral in question fifteen was unraveling into a giant mess, and the students would be helpless against it. He should just throw down his stylus and give them the same finals as last year. The material never changed: energy diffusion rates, course trajectories in deep space, everything the future luminaries of the Inquiry would forget and relearn a hundred times before, God help them all, they were hired into the innards of Navigation or Sustainment. They’d manage. It only felt like this crop was a thousand times duller than their predecessors. But then they’d all ask their cousin or their cousin’s cousin for the solution set, and then they’d all pass having learned jack shit. Which the administration would probably celebrate.

A chime at the door. “Oh, come in.” He tossed the stylus, relishing the bounce.

A shock of blond hair above a jowly face: Professor Biri Micom.

Awen’s mood lightened. “Evening!”

“The students are planning a statue hunt tonight.”

Awen blinked. “Relevancy?”

Biri snorted. “You are acting dean,” they said. “Did Maryv leave Ollie with you?”

“Oh fuck me,” he said aloud. “Yeah, she left it, right next to the faculty evaluation records and all the budgetary data and my goddamn pay raise.” For the dozenth time that month, he hoped that Maryv’s shuttle hit a micro-asteroid the shielding couldn’t prevent and exploded into debris.

“We should find it, move it to the library pedestal,” Biri said. That was the traditional place for the statue, where the night of stealing and counter-stealing between the rival residential colleges would begin. Awen still wasn’t sure why that made it his problem, though.

“A statue hunt, at a time like this! Don’t they have better things to think about? We’re barely out of the Oort cloud, and after that comet last year I’m not sleeping easy yet. And then there’s the algae die-offs. The kids need to stay focused so they can actually help the Inquiry, instead of being just wasted mass.”

Biri let Awen talk. When he finished, they said, “You can’t possibly believe that. You never blew off steam? You never broke into the music complex with us and then ran straight into a security officer when everyone scattered? Never?”

Fair shot. “Maybe I’m just sick of cleaning up Maryv’s messes.”

“More than you’re sick of grading?”

“I’m not grading,” he muttered. “This had better be quick.”

***

They tried Maryv’s old office first. Somehow, Maryv abandoning the Inquiry and taking her chances with deep space had left Awen with all of her responsibilities, but none of the perks. Her office had gone to Ursei Dasaro, Professor Emeritus of Topology, who, as far as Awen could see, spent most of her day yelling at her nervous graduate students.

Dasaro was leaving the office as Biri and Awen came through the hallway’s automatic door. She was well-groomed, with a self-important cast to her face. Every item of clothing, from her shoes to the pin holding back her hair, was shiny and new, practically still had the creases from the fab-system. Awen looked her up and down.

Biri broke the silence: “Hi, we don’t mean to keep you. Did Maryv leave the launch commemoration statue with you, or in her office?”

Dasaro scrunched her face. “Now, I can’t say I’ve seen that. It’s quite distinctive, if I recall. Old world style.”

“So it’s not in your office?” Awen asked.

“No, no, I can’t say that it would be. There were a few boxes of…” She twirled a languid hand. “…dross. But nothing quite so large.”

“Could we check?” Biri waved their hand by the door sensor, but of course it was keyed to just Dasaro’s biometrics.

“Oh, no, I’m sure it wasn’t there. And I refabbed all of those old things, like I said.”

“Moving fast,” Awen muttered.

Biri shot him a look. “Thanks, then. We’ll check somewhere else.”

As Dasaro walked away, Biri mouthed “politics” and gave an exaggerated smile.

Awen waited for the whoosh of the hallway door settling into place. “Where do you think she got all that new finery? Certainly not from the reimbursement office, not for the third time this year.”

“Look, scholars who’ll never reach their true potential deserve some comfort, don’t they?” Biri murmured.

The quip could as easily have referred to either of them as to Dasaro, and both of them knew it. Not that it was easy to reach any potential when the academic establishment on Earth was over three light-years away and receding. Awen sighed. “It’s criminal, is what it is.”

Biri shrugged. They fiddled again with the office sensor, but the light stayed red. “She’s an old person. She can have her luxuries.”

“We’re all in this together, remember,” Awen said bitterly, echoing the phrase the news kept repeating after every setback. “If everyone on the ship wants new clothes three times a year and there’s a 60% yield on recycling, how long would it take us to run out of raw material?” That would be a good exam question, maybe for freshmen. Though afield from Applied Mathematics as traditionally interpreted.

“I didn’t say it was right. It’s not. It’s the sort of materialistic shit that even a hundred years ago would have been stamped right out. But, Awen, darling, you can’t fix every slimy motherfucker in the world.” They slapped the sensor, tried it one more time. No luck. “Maybe Ollie’s in storage. The hunt starts at 2100. We’ve got time.”

***

University storage was deep in the hub of the ship, where the centrifugal gravity was weak enough that Awen always got queasy. The two of them waited in the rickety elevator as it headed hubward and the descriptions on the display flickered: offices, classrooms, cafeterias.

“If Maryv has the statue on her shuttle, so help me, I will launch myself into the void after her,” Biri muttered.

“Don’t do that.” He knew Biri was joking, but he hated the thought of them alone out in deep space, with only the hope of finding one of the other generation ships. It was even hard to picture Maryv, though Awen would have sworn he didn’t care if she lived or died. But imagining the half-sleep of the anti-aging drugs that would give Maryv the best chance of finding something else before her natural lifespan ran out—scary as hell. He still didn’t understand it, what caused a person to give up her tenure, for God’s sake, not to mention her entire life on the Inquiry.

The display cycled through the more esoteric floors of the university: fusion labs, maintenance, garbage processing and reclamation. Storage. The doors opened onto a narrow entryway. Awen’s stomach responded to the lowered gravity by turning over.

Biri studied the array of doors before them. They pushed a few buttons on one of the information tablets. “It can’t possibly be with paperwork. Maybe ‘Department Goods,’ whatever that means?”

They pressed something and one of the doors opened with a hiss of air. The lights in the room beyond flickered shakily to life. A mass of boxes, cardboard and plastic, piled on all sides of the space. On top of the boxes were various knickknacks: some old mortarboards, broken glassware, a cup full of dirty paintbrushes.

Biri put their hands on their hips. Silhouetted against the light and the mess, they looked like an explorer in an old painting. Wanderer above the sea of absolute crap.

They made it two steps into the room, as Awen watched fondly. A change—alarm in their body language. Awen jumped forward as Biri stumbled out, sluggish in the quarter g. They sucked in air, gasping. “Shit, shit.” They slammed a hand onto one of the tablets and the door stuttered as it closed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Stale air.” Biri coughed, then cleared their throat with a lighter affect. “Sorry. Scared me. It’s fine in here, right?”

Awen breathed in deeply. The air was hot and had an unpleasant smell of abandoned things, but it filled his chest the way the nitrogen-oxygen mix was supposed to. “Should be.” The fear passed. Awen began to think: What cascade of warning systems had to fail for this to be a mistake? Where had the oxygen gone? And then the fear was back, but deeper, a maw gaping beneath his feet.

“Damn.” Biri smiled, rueful. “I can’t believe they just let me open that door. Whatever happened to automated warning systems? What a dump. I should write the ombud. I guess I’ll go find an oxygen tank or something and go spelunking. It’ll be an adventure. You don’t have to come, I know you hate it here.”

“Biri.”

They caught something in his tone and stopped.

He met their soft-lidded eyes. “This is a bad sign, right?”

“For…?” But still, 30 years after the two of them had first met and a dozen years since they’d last worked in close tandem, Biri always knew what he was thinking. “Mistakes happen. We can’t extrapolate…” they said softly, chewing on their thumb.

“How can it be a mistake? Where did the oxygen go if no one’s been down here in months? Nothing’s using it.”

“I meant the mistake could be the lack of warning system. Honestly, it’s smart to clear out O₂ from unused rooms. Thrifty even…” Biri trailed off. Then they sat down as heavily as the gravity allowed.

“You see,” Awen said, trying to ignore the roaring of his blood in his ears.

“I am wondering,” Biri began slowly, “why Tlin Maryv left. It occurs to me now, that if the Inquiry’s premier statistician and probabilist wants to shoot through space in a box the size of a classroom, it’s because she thinks her odds are better out there than in here.”

“And the odds she’ll ever find another ship out there, not to mention one accepting castaways…”

“I guess I thought she was having a midlife crisis,” Biri said. They jumped to their feet and began fiddling with the tablet by the door. “Last accessed 3 months ago.”

“Pre algae die-offs.”

“Fuck. This is crazy right? Some conspiracy shit. They said the virus only affected a few of the algae pods. They wouldn’t just… start shunting oxygen out of non-essential areas? Not without telling us something was really wrong. Imagine the work that would take.”

Awen’s thoughts whirled through the storm of his mind. He still felt like vomiting, and it wasn’t just the gravity-sickness. He ticked off his points on his fingers. One: “Someone is diverting oxygen, at least from this one storage room. We need more data.” Two: “Would it be crazier for them to tell us? Can you imagine the panic? 250,000 people, all aware that the air is running out. There’d be riots. It’d be like 2668 all over again.” Three: “But they did tell us, sort of. The die-offs are all over the news.”

“All over the news, but in the same tone as, I don’t know, when the governor sacked his cabinet, or when the cooling tanks flooded Fletcher Park. They didn’t say ‘this is an existential threat’! How dare they bury it with all the other nonsense?”

Awen imagined the suits in their meetings, trying to decide who needed to know and who deserved to be swaddled in comfortable ignorance. The image made him shudder. “You’re the biologist. How much of the ship’s oxygen needs were being met by the algae tanks that went under? How long will it take for the unaffected tanks to repopulate?”

“I’m a genomicist, not a fucking phycologist! Besides, the numbers are cooked. They have to be. One tank is nothing. There’s redundancy in the system. Unless the virus spread from tank to tank…” They trailed off. “Anh Weia’s been in meetings all week. She is a phycologist. I thought she’d been looking harried, but I never considered this.”

Should that comfort him? At least someone qualified was being consulted. But, for any civil servants to come down and beg for help from the eggheads, something was deeply wrong.

“We have to rule out that it’s a fluke,” Awen said. His head spun. “If it’s intentional, there will be logs. There’ll be other dead zones too.”

“And then what? We uncover the conspiracy and then what? We’ll know how fucked we are, but we won’t be able to do anything about it. Unless you’ve got your own shuttle plans.”

“The more we know, the more we can… I don’t know, think of something.”

“Write up a study on the certainty of our impending death, you mean?” Biri breathed in. Their tone changed. “I have to go find an oxygen tank. We have a statue to find.”

“You can’t be serious.”

They met his gaze. Their hands were shaking, but they clasped them together. “There is nothing else to do,” they said with unfamiliar intensity.

***

Awen waited down-elevator. That should have made the gravity sickness better, but of course his stomach continued to churn. While he waited, he undertook a comprehensive search through the data: promised oxygen output of the algae tanks, measured numbers (where available) from various points around the ship. Energy expenditures from vent-points near little-used sections consistent with breathable air being pumped out and carbon dioxide being pumped in. Data analysis was something to do, a path for his brain to follow that wasn’t panic.

Biri came back with the statue, both covered in dust. Oliver Rafael Duncan, better known as Ollie. It didn’t look like much, at least not tarnished with the fingerprints of hundreds of years of students. Just a metal-plated statue of a man sitting in a sleek chair. Duncan had planned to be the first president of the university, but when the Inquiry left Earth, he’d stayed behind to take care of his aging parent. His statue had been dedicated in his place. Awen wondered what he would think, if he’d ever known of the chaos that once every few years swirled up around his likeness.

“You found it,” Awen said.

Biri looked at him. Awen willed that connection the two of them had, the intuitive sense of each other from decades of friendship, to shut tight. “Not hard. There was a map,” they said, their voice fluty and unsure.

“Almost 2100. We should get to the library,” he said as gently as he could. And maybe that was enough, this uncharacteristic gentleness, because Biri knew, then, what he had found. “Let’s have a drink,” he said.

***

They said nothing as they sat in the hallway leading to the library main entrance, passing the liquor between them. After the third statue hunt had ended with engineering students hacking the library lock, a few faculty usually guarded the door—it was tradition. The university’s designers had underestimated students’ desperation to get places they shouldn’t be and had probably, like many of their forebears, pictured the Inquiry as some high-trust utopia without crime or locks. Lucky them.

The liquor felt like acid in this throat. The sound of the vents and the climate control system normally faded to a useless hum, no semantic content, but today they were all Awen could hear. How long did they all have left?

Ahead, a door opened and the sound of laughter tumbled through. A handful of undergrads came around the corner. “Oh, shit,” one of them said at the sight of Awen and Biri, and they retreated, still laughing. They were drunker than Awen. Their voices carried through the hallway in a mess of words: “Can’t we just ask? What’s the worst that could happen?” “Come on?” “No way, I have my rec letter to worry about.” “…suspended!”

In the end, a single undergrad came around the corner, walking stiffly like someone trying very hard to seem sober. Awen recognized them but he couldn’t remember their name. They had a ribbon tied around their wrist representing one of the dozen colleges competing in the hunt. “Hi, um, Professors. I don’t suppose you could, you know, just give us a few minutes with the door? We wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Biri, in all their sensibility, their voice only a little hoarse, said, “Nice try, Alder. But would that be fair?”

Awen couldn’t say anything at all. He was thinking this child is doomed. Not tonight, God willing, but soon, or soon enough, for a value of “soon” equaling “sometime in the next few years.” Before they would live their life. Or maybe they’d all get through this crisis, and it would be a different one that would take them out. Maybe they’d be overtaken by the fabled ships from Earth whose newer tech let them leapfrog the Inquiry. There was no way to know, and no way to do a goddamn thing about it.

The undergrad shifted from foot to foot. “It would be fair, because they could ask just the same. And we really wouldn’t tell.”

Biri swirled their glass. “What do you think?” they asked Awen softly.

What did Awen think? He thought there was something perverse in sitting here pretending the sky wasn’t falling. Didn’t this child, Alder, deserve to know? But didn’t they deserve to be happy in this infinitesimal moment before all the knowledge was out and things truly fell apart? Was that what everyone in the government—Maintenance or Leadership—had been thinking, when they’d made the decision to cover up the die-offs? Just let the sheep graze, keep them content.

“Sorry, not tonight. Good luck. But you’d better hurry,” Awen said.

The undergrad’s alcohol-flushed cheeks went even redder. “Yes, Professor. Sorry.” And they were gone.

Biri sent him a sideways glance. He didn’t have to explain, he never did with Biri, but he felt compelled to: “If we just gave it to them, they wouldn’t have the satisfaction of getting it. You understand, don’t you? They have to solve the small problems so the big ones feel possible.”

Biri nodded. “I hope…” But they both knew what Biri hoped, so Biri left the words unsaid.

Awen and Biri sat in silence as the lights cycled for nighttime, as from behind them in the library came sounds of clattering and hushed voices.

3032 words

E. Carey Crowder lives in Seattle, Washington. Carey writes code for a living, speculative fiction for fun, and cryptic messages only on odd-numbered Tuesdays (mostly). This is Carey’s first published story.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #119A: “The Year the Sheep God Shattered” by Marissa Lingen

edited by Ziv Wities

Suvin couldn’t make the year’s gods, but she could wedge the clay that made them, slamming it into the table over and over again to get the air pockets out. Her village was a good one for god clay, sturdy and functional, and even without Auntie Deri, who had died in the winter, they had three old people and seven children, a solid number of people for making gods.

Two of the children were new to it this year, their gods clumsy and half-formed but powerful with their toddler enthusiasm. The other children varied from Zora, eleven and dreamy, to Jemmy, a stolid seven and absolutely intent on building as many animal gods as he could manage before the gods had to go in the kiln for Midsummer.

The elders were more considered in their approach to the divine, finding and filling in gaps in the children’s work, each according to their own life experience. Seeing that Jemmy managed a chicken god, a sheep god, and a spider god (likely to be friendly to spinners and weavers), Uncle Orn quietly filled in the rest of the village’s life with a god of the fields and a god of the forests. Auntie Larig made a god of childbirth and a god of death, both, so that the god of childbirth didn’t have to take over both functions. She had seen that once, when she was young, and was determined that it would never happen again.

Bei was too old this year, grown gawky and half-responsible. She skulked around the door of Suvin’s pottery, tossing criticism and complaints at those within, particularly her younger sibling Clar, who ignored her. Zora gazed after her for a moment, but then went back to making a god of rainbows. Suvin stepped out to speak with her.

“Aren’t you needed in the dairy?”

Bei shrugged, her whole body jerking.

Suvin tried again. “You’re not making it any easier on yourself watching. Go distract yourself; you’ll mind less if you’re thinking of something else.”

Bei scowled but stalked off, leaving Suvin feeling she’d made things worse rather than better for the girl.

Not everyone minded leaving the rituals of childhood behind them, nor showed their minding in the same way. Suvin herself had found that she missed the feel of the clay but not the spark of the divine, and by Midwinter of that first year she had found herself apprenticed to the previous potter. Neither of her brothers had thought a thing of it, shedding their childhood as thoughtlessly as an old jacket. But neither was Bei unprecedented. Auncle Phee had spent their adult years yearning for the creation of the Midsummer gods, and had settled into old age with a contented sigh.

Suvin wondered if Auncle Phee might be persuaded to have a quiet word with Bei when they were done making gods for the day, or whether that would feel to a prickly adolescent like piling on. In any case, Bei couldn’t lurk around the pottery all day distracting the god makers; that wasn’t good for anyone. Suvin went back in to find Auntie Larig a spare scribing tool.

By the time Suvin shooed them off to wash the clay from their hands (arms, noses, eyebrows), the ten of them had made two dozen gods, small and sure in their rows, ready to be fired. Suvin regarded them with satisfaction and no small amount of worry: this year’s gods would shape the days of the village, not just in their own year, but in their implications in the years beyond.

She could neither stop nor change them⁠—her days of that were gone, or not yet come again. Every year the old gods had to be shattered, and the new made. Everyone knew from harsh experience that keeping old gods, or letting adults in their prime direct the new ones, led to cult and catastrophe. The old gods had been smashed to dust on the green to release their essence, and these were ready to dry, fire, and cool in time to catch the divine spark at Midsummer. Suvin arranged them carefully and slid the trays in, closing the door of the kiln.

She returned a few days later to take them out, ready to pull out gods, whole and cooled. Instead, there was a mass of clay shards and dust, nothing but rubble in the bottom of the kiln. The entire tray was ruined. Worst of all, Jemmy’s sheep god had shattered in the kiln like a hastily thrown pot, taking the god of childbirth, the god of hunting, and the god of the river with it. Not only was this catastrophic, it was unprecedented. Gods were not supposed to shatter. Gods shouldn’t have been able to shatter.

Something was badly wrong, and if they couldn’t hurry to make more, it was going to be a very hard year indeed. Gods of song or war were optional. A god of sheep was essential. Sheep were the lifeblood of the village. There were other keystones⁠—the river, childbirth, hunting⁠—but the sheep god was the worst of the lot to lose in a shepherding village. Suvin ran to find Jemmy, who was still at breakfast with his parents, Wurran and Arev.

“My sheep god?” he whispered.

“It’s not your fault,” said Wurran and Arev in unison.

“It really isn’t,” said Suvin, “but I was hoping you could see if you could make another one while we try to figure out what went wrong.” Jemmy was on his feet before she’d finished speaking, out the door like a flash, and Suvin had to hurry after him to get him clay that was properly prepared. She had just gotten him set up when she found Wurran had followed them both.

“The way I see it,” he said slowly, filling the door of the pottery with his broad shoulders, “the only reason making the gods would go wrong is if some part of the preparations weren’t done properly.”

Suvin cast around the pottery in a panic, trying to figure out how she had failed them. “I got the same clay we always get, but that’s not supposed to matter. I kept it moist and wedged it for them and placed it in the kiln myself; I just don’t see what I could have done to prepare it differently.”

“There’s the other half of the preparations,” said Wurran. He raised a significant eyebrow at her, but she was still not following. “The smashing of last year’s gods.”

Suvin’s stomach sank. “But⁠— we all sang and watched⁠—” But she knew whose name had come into her head at his words.

Wurran’s expression grew intense, as though he’d recognized the awful thought that crossed her mind. “How closely did you watch everyone? A lot of people had more than one god. There was all the smashing and the singing—it’s hard to keep track of everything. And you’re thinking you know whose god it is, aren’t you? Suvin, I’ve known you since we were young enough to make the gods ourselves.”

“I just have a theory. I’ll⁠— I’ll tell you as soon as I have it confirmed. I don’t want to make trouble unless I have to.”

“We already have trouble, and we don’t have much time,” Wurran warned.

“I know. But— we have to get this right. Are you okay watching him here?” Suvin gestured at the workspace, at the ready clay, and Wurran nodded. Jemmy, intent on his second try at a sheep god, ignored them both, focused on the curls and rounds that whispered “fleece” into his heart.

Suvin walked more slowly than she should to the house where Bei lived with her parents, aunt, and sibling. An unsmashed god⁠—oh, how she wanted to be wrong. But when she saw Bei sitting outside on a bench, shelling peas, she knew from the girl’s sullen startle that she was right.

“You know why I’m here, don’t you,” she said, sitting on the other side of the pea basket so she could help shell while she talked.

Bei glared at her.

“It’s already going wrong. The sheep god shattered in the kiln because the power isn’t out of all of last year’s gods yet.” She snuck a glance at Bei’s face. The girl was shaken, ashen. That was a good sign: it had not been deliberate sabotage of the other gods. But Suvin knew she couldn’t stop there, as upset as they both were–and as much as Suvin would have liked to just get back to her silent, malleable clay. “Who knows how much worse it will get from here. You have to give it up, Bei. You have to smash the god. I haven’t told anyone it’s you, you can just— do it now, it’s not too late.”

Bei’s eyes filled with defiant tears. “It’s my last one, my last god until I’m old or maybe ever, not everybody lives to be old!”

Suvin shook her head in disbelief. “We all have a last god; that’s just the way of things. You don’t get to keep it. It sucks power from the new gods, tries to form a cult.”

“Mine wouldn’t.”

“They all do.”

Bei leapt to her feet, upsetting the pea basket. “You don’t know my god of beauty! You haven’t been paying attention to it all year⁠—nobody has but me, you all thought it was stupid! Well, I’m not giving it up, and you can’t make me!” She dashed down the path into the bog before Suvin was halfway off the bench.

Suvin sank back, numb. She had expected Bei to be concerned for the village at large, contrite. Biddable. She had expected Bei to behave like a chastened child. Or maybe a thoughtful adult. This cusp stage had caught her completely off-guard. She made her way back to the pottery in a daze. Jemmy was still hard at work. Wurran raised an eyebrow at her.

“It’s Bei,” she managed. “She… didn’t want to stop making gods. Feels like no one understands her, from the sounds of it. Becoming an adult is difficult, but—”

“But no one else threatens our safety because of it. Bei can’t be permitted to either. We’ll have to track her down.”

Suvin blinked up at Wurran. He was so gentle with Jemmy, she had not expected this reaction. “She’s run into the bog.”

“I’ll go drag her out by her hair, she’s small enough,” said Wurran grimly.

Suvin shook her head. “Would you do that to me?”

“I couldn’t, you’re scrappy.”

“But if you could.”

Wurran thought about it. “No, I’d talk to you first.”

“We have to talk to her first. We’re telling her she’s an adult, we have to treat her like an adult. We can’t just take away all the best parts of being a child without anything in recompense.”

“You’ve earned being talked to first. You behave like a reasonable person.”

“I think sometimes we have to be the first ones to be reasonable.”

Wurran didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a counterargument. The problem, Suvin thought, was that he was the wrong person to do the talking, and she certainly was. In Bei’s mind, she was the cruel person who had chased Bei out of the pottery and denigrated her god of beauty. They would have to find someone else. Someone Bei didn’t find threatening. Someone she loved.

Someone who understood how hard it could be to let go of making the gods.

Auncle Phee was upset to hear the news of the sheep god, and then bewildered by Suvin’s request. “But what can I do for little Bei?”

“Not so little any more. She’s angry with me. I hoped you could talk sense to her. You… reacted like this, but not really.”

They laughed wearily. “I did run off to the bog and weep. I just skipped straight to that part, I suppose. Oh, there was a lot of weeping down there when I was young. I was a little waterfall, you wouldn’t believe.”

Suvin smiled sadly. “We all… grow in our own way. I guess I hoped you might try to speak to her. I could ask her parents, but I think she’s at an age—”

“No, no, not her parents,” said Auncle Phee hastily. “All right, I’ll come. Let me get another shawl and a walking stick.”

The two of them walked together, squelching along companionably on the damp soil. There was neither sight nor sound of Bei until they got nearer the river. Then a thread of her hem showed them where to turn. They found her sitting in the mouth of one of the river caves, throwing rocks angrily into the river.

“Go away!” she shouted.

“We’re just here to talk!” Suvin shouted back. “You don’t even have to talk to me; just talk to Auncle Phee.”

No response. Phee edged closer, though Suvin kept at their heels to provide assistance if necessary. “I know this is hard, Bei,” Auncle Phee started, “but you have to be brave.”

“I don’t! I don’t have to be brave. I can just keep my god with me and it can handle being brave!”

“She’s got us there,” Auncle Phee muttered out of the corner of their mouth.

“But that’s a really bad idea for the rest of us,” said Suvin, equally quietly.

“It is. Bei, that’s a really bad idea for everyone else,” Phee said more audibly. “Like your Dad, or like Clar. I know they must annoy you sometimes—my brother annoyed me—but that doesn’t mean you want them to have to struggle along without any gods.”

“They could share mine!”

“She’s got all the answers,” Auncle Phee whispered.

Suvin sucked breath in through her nose, wishing there were still gods she could ask for patience—especially as that did not look like a blessing that the god of beauty, still clutched in Bei’s pocket, provided. Auncle Phee crept closer. Suvin followed.

“Seeing your god smashed is terrible,” Auncle Phee tried. “Don’t I know it. The whole thing was terrible. It’s the kind of terrible that’s like getting over an ague, though, you just have to grit your teeth and endure it. No one’s come up with another way.”

“Why don’t you, then.”

Auncle Phee wheezed out a laugh. “We’re not that good yet. Maybe that’ll be on you to figure out; maybe that will be your adult work. To quest for some better way, so that people can grow up without pain. I don’t know of one, but maybe you will. But first you have to get there. And a village that depends on one god… isn’t going to raise you or Clar or Jemmy or any of the others to be strong adults who can go on quests. Too many bad harvests and passing fevers for that.”

There was quiet. Suvin wondered if Bei had thought about how little help her god of beauty would be in the face of the barley harvest failing, or spotted fever coming down the river in the wet season. Instead Bei said, “What if you made me another one? A god of beauty? So that mine could just… come back. We have a sheep god every year. If you’d just make me another god of beauty…”

“I can’t, little one,” said Auncle Phee.

“Why does no one understand how important beautiful things are?” Bei cried, and Suvin was moved despite her annoyance. “There are so many, and everyone ignores it! They just go on like lumps, turn the cheeses, milk the sheep, nobody says, oh, look, Bei, look how glorious the lupines are in bloom, look at how perfect this apple is. No one. It’s just me.”

“I don’t mean that I won’t make your god for you, child. I mean that I can’t.”

Bei finally looked at them, sullen but paying attention for the first time.

“My god of beauty wouldn’t be yours. It couldn’t. We don’t find the same things beautiful; we aren’t excited by the same beauty. It wouldn’t catch the same spark. Your god was yours⁠—nobody could have made it for you. I could promise to make you one, but I can’t lie to you and tell you it’ll be yours.”

Suvin thought that Auncle Phee most certainly could have lied. But Bei was listening, at least. Thinking. Suvin had brought Auncle for a reason; it was theirs to try. Even if Suvin hated to see an easy solution rejected out of hand.

“So what do I do?”

Suvin wanted to answer: you just go on. You just do. There will be things in life that hurt, things that you grieve for with your whole self, and you… go on, you turn the cheese, you milk the sheep, you admire the field of lupines, you ache, but you go on. But that was an answer Bei might not be ready to hear. Even in the darkest hours, adults were supposed to be there to help children persevere, to show the way through to light again.

“What if Auncle makes you a different god?” she said aloud.

Both of them jumped. They’d forgotten she was there. “What other god did you have in mind?” said Auncle Phee. “I can’t do everything. I can’t do most things; ask Jemmy what use I’d be at a god of cats or beetles.”

“But the abstract ones, you’re good at those. Something else that could help Bei with the journey she’s on now.” Suvin didn’t toss out suggestions. Auncle Phee, of all people, didn’t make gods to order. If they were to accomplish this, they’d need to do it their own way. Phee’s wrinkled face creased further as they thought it over.

“Two gods,” said Auncle Phee finally. “If I have the time—and I will try very hard to have the time. A god of roads, for this new road you’re on. And a god of childhood. For you to say goodbye to. You’ll have a year to pray to it, be with it, let it bless your ways. A lot can happen in a year. And then we’ll see, after.”

Bei burst into tears, and Suvin was afraid they’d failed beyond redemption. Wurran wasn’t right, couldn’t be right, about forcing the god away from her. Yet if she wouldn’t give in of her own free will, what else was there to do?

But she had misinterpreted the girl’s reaction. Bei stepped out of the cave. Suvin could see her shoulders shaking even from her distance, but Bei held out the little clay figure and deliberately threw it to the ground.

It didn’t shatter on impact. Bei took a hiccupping deep breath, and then Auncle Phee was with her, one arm around her as they handed her the hammer from Suvin’s belt and let her strike the first cracking blow. A rosy light flew out of the god with that blow, but Bei continued, crying and smashing, until it was dust on the stones of the cave. Only then did Auncle Phee stop her.

“Well done,” said Auncle Phee, and Suvin said, “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you had to.”

Bei was crying too hard to answer.

“I’ll get started on those gods right away. There’s still time, isn’t there, Suvin?”

“Of course there’s time,” said Suvin firmly. “Auncle will make you a beautiful god of childhood, light and new, and a wonderful god of roads, strong and broad. And you’ll dance with the other adults at the pole, you’ll take hands and dance. You won’t be alone.”

Bei looked up miserably. “I don’t believe that yet. But I’ll try.”

3280 words

Author’s Note: As often happens with my short stories, I was messing with two ideas that collided. One is that my godchildren are growing up. I am generally pro-growing-up! In favor of adulthood! But it is not at all easy sometimes, in ways that those of us who have already gone through it tend to minimize. The other is that I wanted a fantasy story whose gods are tangibly not just parts of an Earth pantheon in funny hats. “Oh, I’m Bodin, and this is my son Bthor”: no. So I started to think about more seasonal, cyclical ideas of the divine, and this came out.

Marissa Lingen writes fantasy, science fiction, poetry, and essays. She lives in the Minnesota River Valley near its confluence with the Mississippi and is cheerfully obsessed with its geology and limnology. She is also inordinately fond of trees, tisanes, dark chocolate, and Moomins.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #118B: “Margery Lung Is Unstoppable” by Lisa Cai

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details)

Content note: anti-Asian racism and misogyny, murder, body horror, gore, pet death.

The first time Margie raised the dead, it was to prove she didn’t eat her dog. As Harold hadn’t been walked around the neighbourhood recently, her classmate Brenda assumed Margie’s family devoured their dog and caught SARS.

Harold was a beloved member of the Lungs. That grey fluffy Pomeranian guarded Margie since she was born. He spent his final months lying limp on his beanie bed, yet he growled and his fur stood on end whenever the doorbell rang.

Margie arose before dawn to bring Harold back. She squeezed between the backyard’s fence and shed to reach his resting place. She flung fistfuls of dirt off the soaked shoebox. Worms and maggots crawled up her wrists at the sudden disturbance; she brushed them off with her hands.

Poh Poh taught her to raise the dead; with brushes dipped in chicken’s blood, they wrote spells on paper, copying from old instruction manuals, and practiced on mangled squirrels and sparrows in the backyard. Those animals stood, brown wings and furry black arms raised, and hopped towards a small ditch as Poh Poh knelt and rang a bell. Their powers were used for undertaking. Why not do other things before the dead were laid to rest?

Margie pulled a yellow talisman from her waistband and punched it through the box. Gas, grit, and flies burst from her force. The cardboard coffin and surrounding dirt trembled and collapsed inward. A high-pitched yelp came from the grave.

Harold poked his head out of the ground. He licked his pointed nose. His beady black eyes widened staring up at her. He yipped a greeting and wiggled his whole form to shake the insects off and out of him.

“Morning, Harold.” She pulled him by the paws to get him to stand on all fours. Harold wagged his short tail with vigour and smiled with his tongue out. He was so excited to see her and have his strength back! “Wanna walk?”

Harold limped towards her; the surgery he had on his hip last year never fully healed.

Margie retrieved the black leash from her pocket and attached it to his collar. When her parents buried him, they left his collar around his neck because he was irreplaceable.

Margie led them out the backyard. Harold hopped once, twice, then kept to it to follow by her side. The talisman on his back flapped up and down with each bounce. No matter how stiff, goeng-si could always jump.

Based on the dark sky and bright streetlights, it was around six a.m. Brenda’s dad jogged wearing a Walkman, fanny pack, and tracksuit with orange neon stripes. If Margie found him and showed him her dog, he could tell his daughter nobody devoured Harold and he died of old age.

Cedarvale Park’s entrance opened with a misty paved path flanked by tall trees. Leaves crunched under Margie’s slippers. Harold panted. Drool dripped out his mouth and onto the sidewalk.

“Are you tired?” She couldn’t wait for Harold to adjust to his new state; her family wouldn’t understand her motives. They ran a funeral home to send the dead away, not bring them back. Or, at least, they didn’t anymore. They ended the whole leading-the-dead business generations ago.

Her parents and older sister, Evelyn, told her it was disrespectful to revive the dead. How did they know? They never asked goeng-si what they thought. In movies, they usually went on rampages until they were subdued by someone. Margie wanted to sit one down and ask why they came back with bloodthirst.

“Margie, stop!” Evelyn pounded towards Margie in her pajamas.

Harold’s tail wagged and he yipped in greeting.

Margie was going to get an earful from Evelyn. Margie snatched Harold into her arms and charged into the park, dashing up a slope with tall grass. Evelyn, chasing her sister, tripped and slipped into the dirt. Margie reached the top. A man with a racket in the nearby tennis court turned to her. Harold bared his fangs and snarled at the stranger.

“What’s wrong with your dog?”

Nothing’s wrong with him. Margie ran around fencing and hid behind a tree, leaning against the trunk and panting. She’d never find Brenda’s dad now. She had to try one last thing. She held Harold up, so their dark eyes stared straight into the other’s.

“Find Brenda’s Baba!” She had the image of a middle-aged skinny jogger in her mind and burned her gaze into Harold.

He stared at her in concentration. She was trying to teach him a trick and he couldn’t decipher the action he had to perform to get a treat.

Evelyn yanked Margie by her shirt collar. Harold dropped to the ground. Margie kicked and shrieked as her sister gripped her by the waist, but she wouldn’t let go.

“Do you know how much trouble you’re in?”

***

Harold barked and barked at the sisters. They were a pack; infighting like this was never allowed! Sometimes, the two of them argued, but it never got this physical.

Margie’s mouth released a long high-pitched cry. Tears streaked her face. She wailed like that when she was a puppy, spending her days sleeping and feeding. One day, she’d be as big as the other humans because he protected her. Why he had been buried in a box in the backyard was a mystery, but he could bark and follow Margie again.

Margie collapsed onto the ground and he ran up to her. Evelyn yanked the paper off his back and the world went black.

***

The second time Margie raised the dead, it was to extend a long life that should’ve gone longer.

Poh Poh chose to die at home. She didn’t want to be tended to by strangers in a hospice and have instruments run on her. She lay on her wide bed with several layers of blankets. Her cheeks had grown sallow and the outlines of her neck and collarbone creased her skin as she lost weight. A black beanie covered her head as her white hair was styled short.

Mama raised a spoon of congee to Poh Poh’s lips. “Eat.”

Poh Poh parted her lips, took a small sip, and turned her face away. Margie stayed by her grandma’s side, scribbling in a notebook, as relatives entered and left checking in on Poh Poh.

In the afternoon, her chest went still. With her eyes closed and face laxed, she appeared to be sleeping. Once an aunt noticed Poh Poh wasn’t breathing, she called for everyone to gather in the bedroom. Among the crowd, several sniffled or covered their teary eyes. Murmurs about what to do next circulated through the room. Margie knelt in the corner and put her hands over her ears.

Harold’s body rotted behind the shed years ago and was unretrievable, but Margie wouldn’t let Poh Poh leave, not until she was ready. They were supposed to grow bitter melons together in the backyard, as they did every summer. The seeds in the aluminum dishes they set on a windowsill had germinated with tiny white roots sprouting. The crops’ yellow flowers sometimes moved in the direction of the sun. Their leaves shriveled as the nights grew colder. Who was going to look after them with Margie?

Life wasn’t fair. Death was unfair. Why just stay here and accept death? Who was Margie, other than someone who could redefine what being alive meant?

Margie dashed to her bedroom and rummaged through her drawer. Poh Poh was illiterate, but she taught Margie how to write and copy spells. If she had regrets or things left unsaid in this life, Margie would give her one last chance before moving on.

“Get out of the way!” Margie waved the talisman above her and charged into Poh Poh’s room.

“Ah-Margie, stop!” Mama grabbed her daughter’s arm, but Margie jerked away as her mother’s nails left long pale scratches along her skin. She slapped the talisman on her grandma’s forehead. Poh Poh’s eyes popped open and she sprang sitting up.

A cousin screamed at the back. How could Margie use her powers on their matriarch?

“Poh Poh!” Margie grabbed her grandma by the sleeve and shook her. “Say something!”

She passed away ten minutes ago. If she needed to speak, she could do it now, before it was too late. Relatives yanked Margie back. She cried out and stretched her hands out to Poh Poh. She couldn’t be the only one who wanted Poh Poh to stay with them. Who didn’t want their grandma to live forever?

***

Poh Poh observed wrinkles and spots on her adult children and pimples and braces on her grandchildren; her sight had never been better in years. Everyone yelled at each other in the room. All their words meant nothing, travelling jumbled in a circle.

The yellow talisman fluttered up and down Poh Poh’s face. Ah-Margie did that. She was brought back to life minutes after death. Was it worth it? It had been generations since their powers were needed to lead the dead home. She wanted to be buried here, in Canada, beside her husband; she had no intention of returning to her birth village.

Ah-Margie’s eyes were round and focused on Poh Poh even as she was pressed down on the floor by relatives. Poh Poh’s false teeth gleamed between her lips as she smiled. Her laugh was dry and hoarse as her chest expanded with air. She was right to pass on her knowledge of raising the dead. Ah-Margie could, would grow and guide the dead to a dignified final journey. That was all Poh Poh wanted.

She yanked the talisman off, lay back, and resumed being dead.

***

The third time Margie raised the dead, she didn’t have any other choice.

No matter the trauma, body bags were supposed to be still. The zipped white pouch was motionless on the table, yet something beat within Winona’s body.

Margie rubbed her blurry eyes. The back of her head buzzed. Was she imagining things? She had stayed late at the funeral home browsing online.

When Winona was found dead, stabbed outside Spadina Station, a media circus broke out. Editorials discussed how this was related to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or how it wasn’t. Authorities investigated it as a random incident; the killer was unknown, so there was no evidence she was targeted because of her race or gender.

On social media, people declared this sort of thing didn’t happen in Canada. Others posted proof to the contrary: the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Vancouver anti-Asian riots, internment camps, the head tax and Chinese Exclusion Act, border controls, carding, the bamboo ceiling—that was their Canada. What did people do when faced with this? What could someone do?

Winona was named after the area her family immigrated to in Toronto. Margie lived nearby, walked through it, and went to school there. They might have encountered each other in a convenience store selecting candy, browsing through an aisle of books in a library, or waiting at a bus stop.

The body bag expanded and deflated; Winona breathed.

Margie’s hand twitched. This corpse needed to be controlled before it arose and sought vengeance. Anger was the fluid that brought her back to life. Margie was supposed to quell goeng-si from rampaging by placing a talisman on their forehead and leading them to their resting place.

When Margie brought the dead back, she was supposed to guide them towards peace. She had done things backwards with Harold and Poh Poh; they had no reason to come back as they lived long, fulfilled lives and were cared for at death. Winona had none of that. She wouldn’t leave for the afterlife until she got revenge. All Margie needed was a talisman written with chicken blood to give Winona peace. What was the point of having powers if you didn’t use them to fight for a good cause?

The body bag trembled and drummed against the table. Winona extended her limbs and clawed and kicked the pouch like a creature emerging from a womb. Margie unzipped it.

***

Winona had to escape. In the dark, she swiped and punched. Her heels banged the solid surface behind her as the world shook. She tore at her back and dug nails into her wounds. He stabbed her there so many times, when would he stop?

White light beamed on her. Was this a trick of her assailant? Winona extended her fangs and claws to counter whatever came at her.

Her forehead was slapped and vision obscured in white and black by a strip of paper. Her body froze. The world was now dark blue. A small stream flowed over mud and stone. On each side of the water were trees with yellow and orange leaves. Cedarvale Park: she had jogged through there, years ago. Why was she seeing this?

“You’re safe in my family’s morgue,” a woman spoke.

What was she doing here? She was fending herself off from an attacker after leaving Spadina Station. She wanted to grab a book from Robarts Library; classes were finally happening on campus again. The students in her tutorial expected to discuss the professor’s assigned readings. She had to grade papers, edit her thesis, and grab groceries for herself and her fiancé. She couldn’t be dead.

Why was this happening to her? Why did she live to learn about her own death? Winona uttered a cry; something hoarse and hollow emerged from her mouth. Had her body decomposed so far that she was without speech?

A hand stroked her hair. “I’m here to help.”

What could this stranger do for her? She couldn’t return to what her life was.

“Winona.” The woman clasped her hands, claws, and flesh. “They haven’t found your killer, but you can. You’re both connected, whether you like it or not.”

Winona gripped the hands that were offered to her. Her pointy nails dug into the other’s skin. Warm droplets of blood rolled down her wrists. If Winona did nothing, he’d get away with murder.

“I’m from the same place as you, Winona. Men honked at you from cars since you were a teen too, right? You’ve been followed and asked where you’re from. No, where’re you really from?”

It wasn’t just strangers. Her classmates, acquaintances, and exes grabbed her, insulted her, hit her. She was punished for just existing. She always kept her head down and fled in silence. What else could she do? She was helpless, until she died.

“You’ve thought about getting back at all those assholes, haven’t you? We all have.”

Her killer was like all the others who wronged her. He’d continue hurting and targeting others if she didn’t stop him. Winona ground her fangs. Her sharp teeth could crunch down on her killer’s bones and reduce them to bits. She’d render him small for her consumption by tearing up his flesh with her bare hands. She defied heaven and hell to return here; she was the strongest being alive.

She’d thoroughly disrespect him. Her feet could stomp and crush all his organs. She’d splatter blood over his home’s walls and ceiling with the force of her fists. He’d never find closure to his violent end.

“You have a few hours before you have to come back here.” The woman let go of Winona.

***

As the blue-haired VTuber hit the high note at the end of her song, clapping hand emojis flooded the chat. Margie watched the singing streamer on her phone as she waited in the kitchen. She sent several messages with heart icons.

Margie grabbed a dampened cloth and lifted her wok’s lid. Steam puffed up in a cloud, as did the aroma of shrimp, eggs, and chives. The stirred eggs in the tin dish solidified into yellow and white, with a bubbly surface spotted with chopped green onions and mini shrimp. Their tiny black eyes dotted the surface. This was how Poh Poh made it. Margie set it on a coaster and cut it apart in quarters. As she lifted a slice up, the ends of glass noodles hung out.

Her apartment door creaked open. The footsteps were heavy with every stomp and hop.

“Oh, you’re here? Are you hungry?” Margie set up two bowls on her table with steamed eggs and rice. Margie held a spoon; if Winona needed to be fed, she’d help.

The goeng-si turned the corner into view. Winona kept a hand on the wall to support herself. Her palm left streaks of blood on the white wall. Her head tilted right, along with the talisman on her forehead. Margie’d scrub up the blood soon.

Winona stared at Margie. The rank pungent smell of human flesh and blood wafted throughout the kitchen as she exhaled; it was stronger than when corpses were drained of blood for embalming. Winona’s clothes were soaked red. They dripped a dark trail on the floor. She had eaten well.

Margie doubled the portions for nothing. She’d stretch her rice and eggs for lunch and dinner, maybe save some for tomorrow.

“Sit down, at least.” Winona was going to continue hopping as she stiffened and returned to death. Margie retrieved a dark hoodie from her bedroom. She stood by a seated Winona and held the garment up.

“Wear this and we can go back to the funeral home.” Did Winona understand the implications? Her family wanted an open casket viewing. Her face needed to be patched up with wax, clay, and makeup to hide the cuts and bruises.

Winona turned her head up to Margie. Her glassy eyes were spotted red, brown, and black.

“You killed him, right?” Margie said. “Is there anything else you need to do?”

Her head bobbed back, then forward as a nod to her first question, then her head swayed left and right for no. The talisman followed her movements. Margie couldn’t peer into the goeng-si’s mind. If she could, she would’ve asked Harold if he appreciated her placing blankets on him as he slept on his beanie bed and questioned Poh Poh about her adventures subduing the undead.

Margie covered Winona’s head and arms with the hoodie. From a distance, the blood was unnoticeable. The bandages around Margie’s hands pressed against the other person.

In the morgue, the goeng-si’s nails dug deep into Margie’s skin. One way to become a goeng-si was through infection. Tomorrow, she’d unwrap her bandages. If the punctures were coloured anything like a corpse’s, she’d consult the old manuals for antidotes to remove her poison; if that didn’t work, Evelyn would have to subdue her by slapping a talisman on Margie. As tempted as Margie was to prepare comebacks for her sister’s scolding, she had to deal with Winona first.

“Can you run for thirty minutes? That’s all we need.” If Winona jumped from roof to roof as Margie jogged on the sidewalk, they could travel without raising suspicion.

“Y-s….” Winona’s legs trembled as she stood. Margie held Winona by the arm to help her stand.

Her parents would have arrived at the funeral home about now and they’d have to let her in. They sensed when corpses arose. This time, they were too far away to control her. What could they do? Turn her in to authorities and expose their powers? They were forced into silence now. In the end, Margery Lung was unstoppable.

Margie patted Winona’s shoulder as she headed to the front door. According to Poh Poh, their ancestors, for a fee, may have marched the dead from cities back to their birth villages at night by using talismans. They rattled bells to warn people to stay away from them.

She rang her handbell to begin the final command.

3288 words

Author’s Note:

The story’s setting is close to home; I live, work, and play near the Oakwood Village area in Toronto, where Winona Drive is. While Canada likes to prop itself up as a welcoming and multicultural place, it is not without its flaws. I wanted to highlight the historical, cyclical, and systemic violence Asian people, especially Asian women, are subjected to. Using the goeng-si, I wanted a victim of such violence to get revenge.

Goeng-si (also called jiāngshī) are hopping vampires or zombie-like creatures from Chinese folklore. They’re usually depicted wearing Qing dynasty official outfits with talismans clinging to their foreheads. A human may turn into one due to things such as getting attacked and infected by a goeng-si, a bad death (i.e. murder, suicide), or a Taoist priest needing to transport the deceased. Goeng-si genre films experienced breakthrough success in the 1980s with franchises like Mr. Vampire, a Cantonese language series produced in Hong Kong.

Lisa Cai is from Toronto, Canada. She has been published in The Dark, Polar Borealis Magazine, and others. When not reading or writing, she is probably wrangling with IT at a university, watching anime, taking a long walk, or solving crimes in Among Us. Her socials are listed at https://linktr.ee/lisacai.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #118A: “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” by Mary Berman

edited by Hal Y. Zhang and M.R. Robinson

Herewith I present to Your Holiness Clement IV the proceedings regarding the phenomenon at Santa Sabina.

On the 25th day of the month of March in this year of our Lord 1265, I was ordered by the Most Holy Father to the Studium Conventuale di Santa Sabina all’Aventino to evaluate the existence, or lack thereof, of a soul housed within a Wooden Likeness of a Man, the Likeness having been constructed by Father Antonio di Cassino, a friar serving in that place.

Let it be understood, first of all, that no creature can create from nothing. The power of that which produces something from nothing is infinite, and no creature has an infinite power, any more than it has an infinite being. Thus, though Father Antonio may have been able to create a Wooden Likeness of a Man, just as a saw in cutting wood produces the form of a bench, creation of the soul, which is of an immaterial substance, is the act of God alone. Thus it was clear to me even before my arrival at Santa Sabina that the Wooden Likeness could not possess a soul.

The circumstances by which the Likeness was made are as follows: It being nine years ago, in the year of our Lord 1256, Father Antonio constructed the Likeness of cypress wood, this being the wood upon which our Savior was crucified, and he hammered for him a face-plate of beaten gold. A box strung with catgut was placed into the Likeness’s throat, and an animal’s bladder placed in its chest, to allow for the movement of air. By pumping the bladder and maneuvering the Likeness’s jaw by means of a pump-and-pulley, Father Antonio produced the effect of speech within the Likeness.

For nine years, Father Antonio maneuvered the Likeness to do as he did: to genuflect, to speak words of prayer to Our Father in Heaven, to recite the Rosary, and to pass its gaze over the words of Scripture as though in careful study. In this way he strove to multiply the acts of adoration he dedicated to our Lord.

On the first day of January in this year 1265, the Likeness commenced the performance of these actions apparently of its own volition and under its own will.

After some weeks, the Likeness expressed a desire to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist. It need not be stated that in order to receive the Eucharist, one must first be baptized and confess one’s sins. In this case, in order for the Likeness to be baptized, Baptism itself being the cleansing of original sin, and to confess, the Church was obliged to determine that the Likeness was capable of sin, which is to say, that it possessed a soul which, in the way of souls, should remain subsistent when separated from the body and enter Hell or the Kingdom of God.

This is why Your Holiness sent me to the convent.

I endeavored first to determine that the friars of Santa Sabina were not being deceived, as by one of their own secretly manipulating the Likeness. I cannot believe open deception of my brothers, but Father Antonio’s adoration of the Likeness is known throughout the conventuale, and men express their love in strange and mysterious ways. Second, if the Likeness was decided to be genuine, I would determine the mechanism by which it operated of its own free will. Third, I would determine whether it possessed a soul by evaluating its behaviors according to the five genera of parts: vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive, and rational.

Upon my arrival at Santa Sabina, I was led at once to the Minor Basilica, where Father Antonio knelt with the Likeness, which had assumed an identical position.

Father Antonio informed the Likeness of the reason for my presence, and the Likeness greeted me with pleasant warmth. I was struck by this, for the face-plate of the Likeness, though shining and beautifully wrought, is immobile, and one would not think the Likeness capable of expression. The face-plate lacked a jaw, so that it only depicted the upper three-quarters of a man’s face, and the wooden jaw moved up and down upon an iron hinge. The rest of the Likeness’s body, too, was composed of wooden limbs, each meticulously carved to resemble the corresponding limb of a human being and attached by iron hinges at the joints’ hinges. These hinges had once been regularly oiled by Father Antonio; now the Likeness oiled its own hinges and wooden body so that the grain shone, and it polished its face-plate, while the Dominican Friars performed their ablutions.

I found myself experiencing a vague sense of unease.

For the following two days, I shadowed the Likeness as it imitated the behavior of the friars. It was true that the Likeness behaved precisely like one devoted to our Lord. On the third day, in order to preclude the possibility of human manipulation of the Likeness, I requested permission to disassemble it. Father Antonio responded vociferously. However, the Likeness, though it had become rigid upon my request, expressed after a moment a willingness to be dismantled if it meant that it would ultimately be permitted to receive the Eucharist, provided Father Antonio, and only Father Antonio, would reassemble him.

I ordered Father Antonio to stand twenty feet away while I operated upon the Likeness. He did so, seething openly, while I carefully removed the Likeness’s shining face-plate. Underneath the face-plate the wood was rough, even splintered. I manipulated the jaw. I also removed the jaw and its accompanying hinges, revealing a hollow within what would be, in a human, the throat. I reached into this hollow—the Likeness was so stiff as to be almost trembling, which struck me as queer, since its body contained no muscles—and felt, very delicately, the box strung with catgut, and the pipe that led to the bellows within. After this, I withdrew my hand and felt the Likeness’s body all up and down, and studied the pump-and-pulley mechanism that had allowed Father Antonio to manipulate the Likeness before falling into disuse, and knocked the Likeness’s torso. At this point, I determined that my examination had been sufficient, and I permitted Father Antonio to reattach the Likeness’s face-plate and jaw.

Both Father Antonio and the Likeness expressed surprise that I did not conduct a more thorough inspection of the Likeness’s physical form. Your Holiness may be surprised as well. I will say only that the responses of both the Likeness and Father Antonio to the examination were the responses of a man to violence, and the Lord detests those who do violence, as we know from the Psalms.

My examination was certainly sufficient to determine that the Likeness operates according to its own volition, free of external manipulation. It remained only to be determined the mechanism by which the Likeness was able to operate of its own free will, and whether it possessed a soul.

The Likeness, upon questioning, was not able to present a supposition as to the engine that allowed it to move, speak, and apparently think. Father Antonio, however, believed that nine years of repeating the same movements of worship under his guidance, each day the same as the one before, caused the Likeness to learn these movements and to execute them independently.

I said somewhat sternly that if Father Antonio was correct, then he had provided evidence that the Likeness did not possess a soul. For if the Likeness was only imitating the actions of a man devoted to God, he was not expressing his own devotion. Thus can an animal stand on its hind legs without walking upright as a man.

I devised a test.

I instructed both the Likeness and Friar Antonio to compose a tractate on the purpose of worship. At this time, I learned that the Likeness is unable to read or write, and thus he was obliged to dictate his tractate to a scribe, one unstudied in the theological arts, summoned for that purpose. I withdrew into the central compartment of the confessional in the Minor Basilica, and both tractates were slid under the curtain. I read both, studying carefully the language and the thoughts expressed, in an attempt to decide which tractate had been written by a human mind and which was mere imitation.

Both texts were coherent. Though one was more plainly written than the other, each was equally considered. Strangest of all, they diverged in opinion.

I was unable to tell which tractate had been written by Father Antonio, and which had been dictated by the Likeness.

I confess I was greatly troubled. Slowly I emerged from the confessional, and I could see that Father Antonio and the Likeness could read my distress upon my countenance. I was obliged to retreat for a long time to the library, where I meditated on the problem for many hours, and prayed to the Lord for guidance.

At last I emerged to present my findings to the Likeness, Father Antonio, and the other friars who had gathered round, and I present these findings now to Your Holiness:

“It is only to be concluded that the Likeness does embody the powers of the soul: these being vegetative, for the Likeness grew from an inanimate creature into an animate one; appetitive, for the Likeness desires to receive the Eucharist; sensitive, for the Likeness responded with fear and disgust to my examination of its body; locomotive, for the Likeness moves and acts in accordance with its desires; and rational, for the Likeness expresses its beliefs in language. If Father Antonio is correct, the Likeness has learned its habits through imitation, but pure imitation would account only for the locomotive and rational powers of the soul and not the foundational genera. Hence it is necessary to say that the Likeness possesses a soul.

“I have sought, too, to determine the mechanism by which the Likeness has been granted its soul, and I tell you: As God brought all things into being from nothing, so has he done with the soul of the Likeness. It is true that creation, including the creation of the soul, is the act of God alone; but we must allow, also, for the working of miracles, which proceed from God’s omnipotence.

“Thus we must acknowledge that the Likeness has a soul, and so may the Likeness be baptized into the faith.”

The Likeness’s beaten gold face was incapable of smiling. But it threw its arms around Father Antonio and then myself, overcome by joy. And in its joy, as in the joy of a small child, I recognized the spirit of the Lord.

1774 words

Author’s Note: At one point in time, I found myself wondering what the highest ambition of a sentient artificial intelligence might be. I concluded that, like the Little Mermaid, a robot might wish to have a soul. To me, a woman raised in the Catholic Church, the concept of a soul has certain theological implications, so I thought it would be very interesting if the robot also wanted to be baptized. But how would you—or the Church—be able to tell if the robot really did have a soul? And what would it mean, theologically, if it did? Saint Thomas Aquinas would certainly have opinions on the subject!

Mary Berman is a Philadelphia, PA, USA-based writer of mostly speculative fiction. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi, and her work has been published in PseudoPod, Cicada, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere. Find her online at www.mtgberman.com or read her monthly creative writing newsletter at mtgberman.substack.com.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

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.

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.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

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.

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.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.