Fiction – Page 20 – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #31B: “The Entropy of a Small Town” by Thomas K. Carpenter

I gave up the memory of my first kiss to fix the carburetor. It uncoiled from my mind like a constrictor that’d just figured out it was strangling a steaming pot of chicken soup, or the way an unclasped belt loosened and released a pair of tight hipster jeans from some skinny hips, maybe even Osmond’s.

Sitting in the attached garage surrounded by smudged grease, crumpled car parts, and a snot-filled rage that oscillated between “No, I’m fine” and “What the hell does any of it matter” I pictured that kiss as it slipped free.

It’d been awkwardly delivered by a girl in seventh grade, behind Hamilton Elementary School, where they parked the buses they didn’t have the funds to fix anymore. Her name was Abby Silver. She’d kissed me with open eyes and rubbery lips, and whispered my name, “Phillip?” as she pulled away.

Eventually, I couldn’t hold onto it and the memory became an object I couldn’t describe, like being told a word in an alien language and trying vainly to picture it. The first time I traded a memory, I tried to cheat the reaction by writing it down in exquisite detail first. Afterwards, it was like reading someone else’s diary, someone who knew you, but somehow in your small town, you’d never met. It gave me the uncomfortable feeling my life was being observed and recorded. I never tried that again.

When I looked back to my oil-stained hand, covered in little black cuts from torn steel, the carburetor looked solid and whole like a frozen gray heart. Even the dirt had been cleansed from its skin and my fingernails were angry dark crescents against it.

I was about to fix the radiator, crushed like a wad of spent tissue paper, when the screen door from the kitchen wheezed open. Osmond’s mother backed in with an arm full of laundry, untidy hair spilling over her lumpy black dress. I escaped out the side door before she saw me.

I headed towards the center of town, following signs of the accident. Using a memory from when I went to the water park forty miles away with my parents only to find that it’d closed, I uncurled the stop sign, putting it back into its stiff policeman’s pose, which only reminded me of Osmond’s father, red-faced and shouting in a world full of “No”. I ran from that corner, forgetting that I’d been trying to hold onto a memory, which one, I didn’t know, before it obliterated.

My physics teacher, Mr. Anderson —a puffy-eyed well-known bachelor who wore pink Hello Kitty! socks most days —had once explained that the second law of thermodynamics stated that entropy always increased.

The laws of entropy explained why life was always so complicated. Whenever Osmond and I skipped class behind the gym, he would smoke cigarettes and talk about whatever new band he was into, while I admired his pale, lean arms sticking out from an ironic Ramones t-shirt with expertly cut off sleeves. If either one of us was having a bad day, which was most of them for Osmond, we blamed it on entropy.

Why did Osmond’s dad drink whiskey and yell at him at night? Entropy. Why had the Grizzly Bears sold out on their latest album? Entropy. Why did there always have to be so much physics homework? Entropy.

The last one was all me, and a bit of a lie. Mr. Anderson was why I’d considered a career in physics and had even applied to MIT, his alma mater. But Osmond and I didn’t share any classes and I never had anything to really complain about, so I’d made it up.

But entropy couldn’t explain how I could exchange memories to fix things. By the second law of thermodynamics, I shouldn’t have been able to put things back to how they’d been before. Giving up the memory violated the law as much as the fixing did, because that made it like it had never happened.

When a cherry red Camaro drove past me on the way to the Quickie Mart, I used the epithets they hurled at me, ones I’d heard a hundred times before in this small town, and fixed the cracks in the sidewalk. I repurposed my memories so quickly, their insults burnt up on contact, like an icy rain falling into a hot fire.

I always wondered if the Streets Department ever noticed that the sidewalks and roads were in better shape than their age would indicate. Maybe they thought a concrete faerie was protecting its realm, and maybe it was.

When I got to the old oak tree that Osmond’s light blue Chrysler Dynasty had crashed into last week, I clasped my hand over my mouth, smelling the leftover oil and grease I couldn’t quite scrub free, and trembled like a knife thrown into the dirt.

Black skid marks stained the gravel-speckled street, turning to raw earth as the tires had hit the grass. The whole scene looked like a giant had punched the tree, dragging its Neanderthal knuckles through the dirt as it swung. Little bits of plastic were imbedded into the tree that had a crack wide enough to fit my hand snaking up the trunk. Already, the leaves on the north side had withered, curling up just like I had to do each night to get to sleep.

Fixing static objects like stop signs and carburetors was one thing. They were frozen entropy and maybe fixing them rearranged the atoms enough to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. But living, growing things were another. They were entropy in motion, constantly changing and updating themselves.

I thought for a while about what memory would be strong enough to fix the tree. It would have to be something that went down to the core of who I was. I studied myself for clues: jeans so tight they looked painted on, a belt I painted gold because the stupid Sears here didn’t carry the kind of clothes I liked to wear, an aqua linen buttoned-down shirt.

The first memory I toyed with trading was the time Osmond and I were sitting on the picnic table someone had hauled out to Knoll Point, when we talked about my ability. I’d shown him how I could fix things, putting a broken pencil back together as proof. He asked if I could fix people. He had a hungry, vulnerable look about him. I tried to kiss him, but he pushed me back. It wasn’t like we hadn’t kissed before; we’d been having steady make out sessions for the previous month since we’d got drunk on cherry wine and I made my move.

“Can you fix people?” he asked again. “Can you fix what’s in their head?”

“What do you mean?” I asked in a throw-away voice, clutching my hands into fists.

He shifted on the table then, hands and face flinching in a syncopated dance, mouth jawing at the question he wanted to ask, but settling on the one that actually came out.

“My dad. Could you make it so he wouldn’t care?” he asked eventually.

I was so mad at the time, I didn’t even answer. I pulled out a lighter that we used for making cozy fires in the rock-lined pit, flicked the flame to life, and held my hand over it.

“Tell me you love me,” I demanded as I lowered my palm onto the flame. The pain bit into my hand, nerve endings searing and turning to black smoke. The outer layer of my skin cracked, black with char. My muscles jumped and flexed, ready to lift my hand free of the flame.

“I need a powerful memory to fix it,” I said through gritted teeth, imploring him with my face, constricted into a hideous mask to say the words.

“I love you, Phillip,” he said, his mouth opened into a wide circle of horror.

When I pulled the flame away, he grabbed my arm and turned my hand over, recoiling from the damage. Tears squeezed out of his eyes as he tenderly tucked my hair behind my ear.

I felt like such a bitch for tricking him like that, but I was mad at him that he didn’t love me like I loved him. I repaired the third-degree burns on my hand, with a memory I no longer remember, but it wasn’t what had just transpired between us.

When the flesh was knitted and whole, Osmond pulled back, and changed the subject to what we were going to do after school. Either I was a such a good actor that as I explained I thought I was going to go to Cal Tech to study architecture that he believed I traded away that memory, or that he was so wrapped up in the question he’d wanted to ask that he didn’t notice. Either way, that was the only time he’d ever spoken those words to me.

I left the old oak tree in the state I’d found it, realizing that if I kept trying to fix everything in this little town, I’d end up an empty husk of patchwork memories. Put enough holes in my past and eventually the lattice would collapse.

Hamilton General Hospital was only two blocks from the site of the crash. I snuck around the nurse’s station, using a guy rolling a rack of food trays with what seemed like a thousand quivering bowls of Jell-O as my shield.

Osmond was alone when I entered, his family had left for the day. His eyes were sunken and the mask over his mouth looked like something you’d see on an alien spacesuit. The tubes and wires turned him into a puppet that no one had bothered to animate. Only the faint mist of breath against the mask indicated he was alive.

I was sitting on the chair next to Osmond holding his hand when his father came in. He was wearing his Sheriff’s uniform. His jaw pulsed with an anger that made my eyes flick to the gun at his hip.

“I told you, you’re not welcome here,” he said, puffing up his chest. “You did this to him.”

I was glad there was a bed between us. Not glad, maybe frightened. Frightened of what I might have done if I’d been in the chair on the other side.

My lips hardened into knives, thin blades dripping with venom. “I wasn’t the one driving his car. Drunk.” He blinked. “And if you so much as touch me, I’ll tell every newspaper in the county about what happened.”

Osmond’s Sheriff father actually reeled on his feet as if I’d punched him right in the mouth. His knees buckled and his face went through contortions of thought as if he were walking across hot coals.

Osmond and I had been making out in his light blue Chrysler Dynasty when his father had found us. There was no question to what we were doing, Osmond’s hand was down my pants when the flashlight burned into the car.

His father had yanked me out, shouting gin-soaked curses. Osmond tried to defend me, clawing at his father like a wounded cat.

Osmond’s father never hit me, but I wish he had. Maybe then he wouldn’t have driven away in a drunken rage.

Osmond was shoved into the passenger seat, and the Dynasty spat gravel in every direction before fishtailing down the road, leaving the Sheriff’s truck idling by the side of the road with the door open and the lights on. I shuffled back into town, puffy-eyed, and came upon the wreck after the ambulance had already left.

The airbags had deployed, but the passenger side of the Dynasty had slid into the old oak tree and Osmond’s head had hit the glass so hard the concussion put him into a coma.

His father sank into the chair across from Osmond’s lifeless body and sobbed into his huge hamhock hands. When he finished twenty minutes later, he didn’t look up, and said these words as if nothing had transpired before: “I just want my son back.”

After the Sheriff left, I placed my other hand on Osmond’s and squeezed.

The funny thing about entropy was that as chaotic and destructive as it sounded, it was quite life-affirming. A static Universe was just a button of unreleased matter. A flower that couldn’t bloom was dead.

I placed my fingertips on his temples and summoned the memories of Osmond and I together: the way his smile twitched when he was thinking of me, his lean hips, laughing at the jocks sweating on a hot August day in their football pads, the taste of mint as he kissed me, skinny-dipping in Miller’s Creek before we both knew, the glorious burning entropy of the night sky as we lay on a blanket on Knoll Point holding hands and whispering to each other as if we might disturb the heavens.

Just as I was leaving the hospital room, the boy who’d been laying in the bed was awake. His brown eyes locked with mine as he pulled the mask down.

“Phillip,” he said, his tone imploring me to stay.

“You’re Osmond, right?” I asked, one foot in the antiseptic hallway.

His eyes flickered with confusion, twice, as if the first time wasn’t enough. He looked at the bed and the medical equipment which brought signs of recognition.

“Yes,” he said, his lips curling into disappointment. “Have a good time at Cal Tech.”

“How did you know I was going to Cal Tech?” I asked, stunned and trying to remember why I’d come to the hospital in the first place. I guess it was because I went to school with Osmond. I probably had a crush on him, though I’d never let him know it.

He looked around the room as if he was trying to find a script to read from.

“I guess I heard you mention it in class,” he said, dejected, which confused me in turn.

“Well, have a great life,” I said, and left the room.

I thought I heard something that sounded like, “I love you,” from his room. I hurried back in, my heart beating like a thunderstorm, hands and face tingling with electricity.

“What did you say?” I asked, breathless.

Osmond paused for a moment before saying, “You, too.”

The words dropped unceremoniously from my lips, “Oh, thanks.”

I left Hamilton General Hospital with the nagging feeling I was forgetting something. I’m sure it had something to do with leaving town in a few months. Maybe I was a little disappointed that I was almost eighteen and I’d never had a first love.

But that’s okay; I’m a flower bud buzzing with entropy. Someday I’ll bloom, and it’ll be glorious.

Author’s Note: A couple of different scenes sort of grew together in my head as I was contemplating the idea of trading memories for magic. The first was the protagonist cradling a greasy carburetor. I didn’t know why at the time until I had the scene with the lighter come to me on a run (I get my best thinking done when exercising). The rest just snowballed from there.

Thomas K. Carpenter writes in a variety of genres including: post-cyberpunk, historical fantasy, YA dystopia, alternative history, steampunk, and contemporary fantasy. His short fiction can be found in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Abyss & Apex, Galaxy’s Edge, and other publications including this one. The Alexandrian Saga, his best-selling alt-history series, has reached readers worldwide, while his current series, The Hundred Halls, is a cross between Harry Potter and Supernatural at university. The first four books of the series can be found on Amazon, starting with The Trials of Magic.

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DP FICTION #31A: “Strung” by Xinyi Wang

The red string around Mom’s ankle does not lead to Dad, and Dad doesn’t have a red string at all. But she makes him laugh with his head thrown back, and he makes her smile the way I do at Ria Ruiz, the prettiest and smartest girl in not just my class but the whole first grade—so they must be in love, no matter what the Old Man in the Moon says.

“I hope I’m like you when I’m older,” I whisper one night, as Dad tucks me in.

He smiles and lifts his brows. “Bald?”

I scrunch up my nose. “No. I mean I don’t want a string, like you. I don’t want the Old Man to tell me who to love.”

Dad looks down at his unburdened ankles for so long I nearly fall asleep. Finally, he presses a kiss to my forehead. “Sweet dreams, Weilai.”

I change my mind for the first time two years later, when my oldest cousin gets married to a golden-haired lady who shares a string with him. The red between them coils at their feet, pulsing as they exchange beautiful words about fate and certainty. My parents are still happy together, but what if Mom would be happier with the person on the other end of her string? And if a scant ring of red appeared around Dad’s ankle one day, would he leave? Would he want to?

It would be better, I decide, to have a string and love who the Old Man says you should. That way, there is no doubt. Only certainty. For the first time, I consider myself lucky to have been born in the Old Man’s domain, under his sky with his moon overhead—to have eyes that can see the intricate web of red unspooled all around us.

But when my string shows up in the middle of my third grade math class, it unfurls like wildfire and bleeds out of the room instead of to Neal Lang, who I’ve loved for three whole weeks. I bite my tongue to keep from sobbing, but fat tears leak out anyway because whoever the Old Man wants me to be with is not this perfect boy who made me a daisy crown and asked me to be on his kickball team. A steady chant of “wrong wrong wrong” beats against my skull. My vision blurs, but not enough to wipe the red from the corner of my eye.

Miss Sabrina calls my parents when I can’t stop crying on my times table, and Mom carries me out to the car even though I’m getting too big for it.

“The Old Man is not absolute,” Mom says when we stop for milk tea on the way home. She lets me put my feet up on her lap while we wait for our order, gently rubbing my newly-bound ankle. “He was wrong about me.”

“How do you know?” I confetti my napkin and pinch the insides of my wrists to stave off fresh tears. “What if your destiny is better than Dad?”

Her mouth smiles. “Who could be better than Dad?”

I swirl a finger through the pile of napkin scraps before me, then shrug. “What if.”

Our strings trail off into the distance, in parallel. They snake across the street, around an elm, and out of sight. Mom stares out the window as she says, “I have more faith in me and your father than I do in any distant old man. Don’t you?”

As I chew on a mouthful of tapioca pearls, I change my mind again. About wanting a string, a destiny. About trusting, so wholly, the will of an invisible stranger. What does the Old Man know, anyway?

Over the next twenty years, I will change my mind twenty hundred more times—sometimes from day to day, hour to hour.

Mom and Dad get divorced, and my faith returns. As they sign their papers at the dining room table, Mom’s string runs, as ever, away from Dad—a stark warning that they were never meant to be. So if the Old Man knew they were wrong for each other, he must also know who’s right for me. With that belief lodged firmly in my bones, I spend a summer chasing my string. Mom and hundreds of generations-old stories say it’s futile; no one has ever found their destiny by looking. But I still devote three sweltering months to the search, tireless even when the red wisping away from my ankle leads me in infinite figure-eights through town.

A year later, my cousin and his beautiful, fated wife split as well—so I abandon faith again and take Katie Nilini to junior prom, even though my string arcs past her without ever brushing her skin. She beams as we dance to bad remixes and worse ballads, and my heart pounds when she sticks her fingers into the chocolate fountain and smears the melt across my nose. I hold her gaze all night, not once looking down at the red that winds away from us.

But when I kiss her on Monday, between classes, I can’t help staring over her shoulder at my string—running down the hall and out the door, away from her and her lilac perfume. The Old Man knows best, or he doesn’t. Either way, I can’t stop thinking about that damned sliver of red.

In college, I date but don’t commit. Five or six weeks into every relationship, I cycle from ignoring my string to agonizing over the destiny waiting at its end. Guilt over those wandering thoughts quickly fills my chest, and I pull back from my partners with vague excuses and genuine remorse.

A few ask, beg, scream for real explanations—and I tell them the truth. I palm my ankles and talk all night about the ethereal red that streams toward my unknown destiny. About wanting certainty, but being helpless against doubt. About my parents, my cousin, and my ever-changing mind.

They listen until they believe, even though—born outside the Old Man’s land, beneath a different moon and sky—they can’t see red like me. I swallow thickly, each time, and ask if they still want me after hearing all that.

They never do, but I never expect them to. After a dozen cycles in three years, I start choosing to be alone.

I don’t date again until my final year of grad school, where I meet Aaron Lao. He’s a professor, with eyes that see like mine, and he has his own string that doesn’t lead to me. We agree from date one that this won’t be serious, because his faith in the Old Man’s wisdom has never fluctuated like mine—he intends to spend his life with his destiny, once they find each other. I’m just for now, just until then, but I still fall in love with him over midnight talks about Confucian principles in wuxia novels.

“You’ll be happier with yours,” he says a year later, when he finally meets his destiny. His brow is creased, and he breathes an apology against my skin when he kisses my ankle. If I ask him to choose me, I’m afraid he might.

So I don’t ask, because he needs certainty that he’ll never have with me.

But knowing that doesn’t soften the loss. I wake up missing him for months afterwards, and I begin to hate the Old Man and his strings. Some nights, I drink and stick my head out the window and shout at the moon. Once, I sink to my kitchen floor and take a knife to my string. It curls like water around the blade, enduring, and I only succeed in slicing open my palms and spilling fresh red across my skin.

Therapy helps. Not immediately, but with time. After a year of weekly sessions with Dr. Aimee Ping, I unlearn my habits of glancing at my string a hundred times a day, of crossing my ankle over my knee and curling my fingertips beneath the band whenever I can spare a hand. Of caring entirely too much about the trickle of red that plagues my periphery.

By my ten-year high school reunion, I’m close to believing that I don’t need or want the Old Man telling me who to love. Close enough that I go up to Neal Lang at the reunion. My string still doesn’t run to him, but I still tell him I had the biggest crush on him in third grade. He laughs with his head thrown back as we talk, and I can’t take my eyes off him when he ducks across the gym to refill my punch cup.

I stay in therapy, and Neal and I stay in touch. Daily texts turn into nightly calls, and we start thinking of ourselves as a couple. We stay long-distance and non-exclusive at first, which helps stave off the guilt that once squeezed my lungs every time I’d glance at my ankle, away from a loving partner, and wonder. I almost tell him, a hundred times over, about destiny, a string he can’t see, and the Old Man in the Moon.

But I imagine swallowing thickly and asking if he still wants me after hearing all that, and fear of history repeating drives me to say, instead, “I love you.”

To say, eventually, “Marry me.”

We exchange vows at his parents’ church, and move into a condo with my dog and his two cats. Red spills from our home and runs unerringly toward my supposed destiny, but I think on it less and less—once a day, then once a week, then rarer still.

But as much as I want to, and as hard as I try, I can’t stop wondering altogether. Sometimes, unbidden, my mind drifts along the red river flowing away from Neal and floods with the idea of destiny. A pang of guilt accompanies each of those thoughts, and they coalesce over time into a dense weight beneath my skin.

On our tenth anniversary, we sprawl out beneath the full moon in our backyard. I’m bloated with good wine and Neal’s love and my decade-old knot of guilt, and I know I won’t be able to stand again without shedding a part of that weight. So as he makes me a daisy crown, I tell him everything. I talk about a string he can’t see, a weight he can’t feel. I describe the winding maybe that I sometimes stare at when we’re having breakfast at the kitchen counter.

And when I’ve talked my voice hoarse, I force myself to add, “If this is a deal-breaker, I understand.”

Neal is quiet as he turns the finished crown in his hands. Stray petals float down his wrists, and the heat of shame and fear slide down my chest in tandem. Finally, he places the crown on my head and hooks an ankle around mine.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t mind.”

My breath stutters. “How could you not?”

He shrugs, his shoulder warm against mine. “The way I see it, everyone wonders. Whether or not they’ve got a string to follow. Thinking ‘what if’ doesn’t mean you love me less. It just means you wake up every day and choose me.”

“And—” I roll onto my side to look him in the eye, my own stretched wide. “And it doesn’t bother you that maybe one day I won’t?”

“Of course not,” he says, like it’s obvious. Like it’s easy. “Because it’s just as likely that one day, I’ll wake up and not choose you.”

I turn back to the moon, quiet for a long moment as Neal’s words loop in my mind. The crown’s petals are soft against my forehead, and Neal’s ankle is a solid weight atop mine. My red string, caught between us, squirms free and cascades into the distance, bright and stark beneath the light of the moon. It pleads for my attention, presents me with a choice.

Neal is smiling when I close my eyes and kiss him on the mouth. I choose him again the next day, and the next.

As for the ones after that—that’s between me and Neal, and not the moon.

Xinyi Wang was born in Beijing and raised in Northern California. They studied Creative Writing at UC Riverside, then resettled in the Bay Area to drink mass amounts of milk tea. When they’re not reading, buying hats, or refreshing the same five websites for hours on end, they write stories and babble intermittently on Twitter @byxinyi.

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DP Fiction #30B: “Typical Heroes” by Theo Kogod

Tony started training the new girl the day before the world ended.

It was the third apocalypse that year.

The others had occurred when the dead all rose to fight the frost giants, and then again when the President’s new cyber-security tracking program became sentient and started sending combat drones against registered voters of the opposing party.

Tony was registered with the opposition, and had actually gotten to see the drones up close and personal as they descended on him, but then one of the supers had flown in and saved him, so he’d ended up still having to go to work.

He’d worked at NuremBurger for a little over a year, ever since New York had raised the minimum wage and the shoe store had let him go to cut costs.

The restaurant paid him all right, but he needed more hours. He hadn’t been able to get a real date in ages, since everything he owned now smelled like fry oil, sauerkraut, and chemically-treated pseudo-meats. His boss, Mr. Schulze, was one of those “I’m not racist but—” racists who was forever making people uncomfortable by trying to show how enlightened he was.

Yesterday, his boss had introduced Tony to his newest hire—a cute freckly twenty-something whose figure Tony guessed was half the reason Schulze gave her the job. “Antonio, I want you to meet someone,” Schulze had said in that merry I’m-excited-but-in-control voice that was a staple of white people’s professionalism. Tony had long ago stopped trying to get Schulze to stop calling him “Antonio,” which the balding middle-aged man seemed to think was a display of cultural sensitivity. Tony needed more hours, so he put up with it, and instead of saying “Please, just call me Tony,” he said, “Yes?” at which point he was introduced to “Patricia Strauss, though she prefers we call her ‘Trish,’ don’t you, ‘Trish?’”

He had shaken Trish’s hand. “Tony,” he said, holding her gaze long enough that she wouldn’t catch how he eyed her up and down. Trish had a slim fit figure, which her low cut shirt and skinny jeans accentuated enough for Schulze to honor her preferred nickname. In fact, she had the hard-lined athletic build of a gym rat, and he guessed she was probably into weightlifting or rugby or one of those other tough-people sports rather than the usual pop-music Pilates and celebrity-of-the-month yoga. Her freckly face was halfway between cute and “don’t call me cute,” with her blonde hair pulled back into a short-cropped bun.

“Antonio here is one of my best cooks,” said Schulze. “Antonio, I’m gonna have her watch you cook a bit, okay, and let you two get to know each other some. Meanwhile, I’ve gotta go deal with all the drama out there,” he gestured toward the dining area, where a tangle of stressed-even-for-New-York-rush-hour customers dressed in Stars-‘n’-Stripes T-shirts were shouting.

Tony shook his head at them once his boss’s back was turned. He’d never understood how people could be patriotic. His own father had been a proud US citizen after emigrating from Chile, and had carried a small tourist-sized American flag folded in his wallet until the day he died. But Tony never got it, any more than he got how people worshipped all those American celebrity heroes, All-Star and the Twelve Stripes, flying about to rescue babies and fight aliens on TV. They weren’t any different than any of the other televangelist Congressmen or born again reality-TV-stars he’d seen, except they had powers, which supposedly symbolized the American dream. Hearing a bunch of crazy tourists make a scene while wearing shirts with All-Star and his super-groupies annoyed Tony almost as much as the American Heartland-types who came all wide-eyed to stare up at the Statue of Liberty and Times Square as if the crass monuments still had meaning.

The real America was the same here as anywhere else: flipping burgers, selling Chinese-made clothes, mowing lawns, and doing real work while just barely paying the bills. The only difference was that here you could occasionally catch a glimpse of the supers flying over Wall Street to keep the suits there safe from the shitstorm that rained down on everyone else.

He tried to drown out the noise of a particularly vocal banshee-tourist and focus on training the new girl.

“So, is this your first cook job? What all do you know?” Tony asked, flipping two of the patties sizzling on the griddle.

“No. I’ve had a number of them,” she said, and began listing restaurants ranging from a high-end steak joint to a few chain stores that made McDonalds look like fine dining. Altogether, she named eight different restaurants before trailing off.

“Jesus, that’s a lot! How many jobs do you work at once?” Tony asked her. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five, and yet she’d worked at more places than he had.

“I spend a lot of time supporting my family. It’s made me change jobs a lot. And, I mean, you know how it is in this economy,” she said, fidgeting and looking away.

He agreed, and they got talking as he taught her how to defrost the burger patties, fry the “Frank Fries”^TM, and coached her on the subtleties of the menu’s German dishes.

Eventually the tourists got too loud, and Tony couldn’t help but mumble “fucking cape-chasers” a little too audibly.

“What?” said Trish, giving him a look. “They’re not so bad. And besides, it’s not like the supers don’t serve and protect us.”

“No, they serve and protect you! People like you. The rest of us get lucky sometimes, but pale skin and good looks go a long way toward getting saved. I grew up being stopped and frisked and profiled by cops and capes alike every day on my way to school, and not much has changed since I became an adult. So no, I’m not a fan, and don’t buy into the whole line about them keeping us safe,” Tony said.

“Oh, come on! First, there are plenty of supers of color! Time Cube and Conqueroot and Black Turner, for starts, and oh, Olmech is Mexican! And second, don’t you watch the news? Tomorrow everything could be gone! Our reality is about to be invaded, and it’s the supers who are keeping us safe! Without them, we might not even be here!” Trish fumed, furious and passionate.

It was a more serious reaction than Tony had been expecting.

He took a breath before responding, collecting himself. “Look, I don’t like talking politics at work, okay. But since you care so much, let me put a few things out there. I don’t care about supers, whatever their color. It’s just not my thing, any more than I care about the Kardashians or Brangelinas or any other celebrities. They don’t affect me, and for all the tragedies they miss, the world keeps turning. They don’t change the things I go through, y’know. I’ve got rent and child support to pay and I’d like to get through a day without being told some dumb shit about how Olmech being Mexican should be important to me. I’m Mapuche, not Mexican.” He sighed. “Now, can we just get back to work?”

The rest of the day at the restaurant progressed with only minor incidents. Trish overcooked a plate of spätzle and a tourist ripped off their server with a 2% tip. When Tony left, he agreed to help train Trish some more the next day.

On the train home he squeezed into a seat between a Hasidic couple speaking Yiddish and a trio of over-pierced teenagers excitedly discussing the news that tomorrow the Twelve Stripes would join forces with the other supers to help repel an incursion from the fifth dimension (or was it the fifth sphere of hell? He couldn’t tell from how they babbled on in nonstop manic slang). He remembered being that age, and actually being excited by the supers and the big events of the world, as though anything ever changed. That was before his uncle had been brutalized for an unpaid traffic ticket, before his cousin had been shot while cosplaying, before Marianne had taken their son.

Until Marianne, he could deal with it. He got that the world just wasn’t fair. He had no heroes—not capes, not politicians, not entertainers—yet he still took care of things. But when she left him for her new job doing IT for All-Star and the Twelve Stripes, she’d taken Dante.

She’d taken their son.

Tomorrow—Friday—the world would end.

And so what? His world ended every Friday, when he got his paycheck and there was that little bit missing for child support—when all he wanted was to actually be there to support his child in person. On Thursdays, he should’ve gotten to see Dante after work. It was his visitation day, and he should have gotten that day—all of it. But Schulze always changed the schedule at the last minute so he had to work until the mid-afternoon. The last time he’d argued with Schulze about this, the man had threatened to fire him, and cut his hours so he only worked Thursdays for the next two weeks.

Normally, he’d be picking Dante up from daycare on a day like this, but Marianne wouldn’t let him “endanger himself spending an evening with his damn burger flipper of an absent father when there are things going on in the world.” He’d called, texted, Facebooked, and Skyped her, and she’d still denied him, which meant there was pretty much nothing he could do about it since she got off before him. Dante was already with his mom, and Tony didn’t have the codes into her apartment building. Maybe it was better for Dante, being stable and all. What did he need with a father who could see him only once a week?

There was that old saying about how the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Well, the more they stayed the same, the worse they got, but at least Dante’s mom might be able to shield him from some of that.

Tony got off at his stop, walked the three blocks from the station to his apartment, and settled down with a beer and leftover Chinese takeout as he watched old episodes of Sabado Gigante on his tablet. Normally, he’d spend Thursdays cooking a special dinner to share with Dante, asking about his week, and then (if the boy had done his homework) they’d watch cartoons together on the tablet, but tonight, he just didn’t want to think.

As a kid, that’s what TV was for. There weren’t so many end-of-the-world scenarios back then. The US was a safe country, “the safest America” his father used to say, as they exported all their misery to the other Americas, and because their heroes really did keep the world safe. And while he didn’t quite agree, he at least saw his father’s point.

That was back before the Twelve Stripes had changed their lineup. Back when the old All-Star—the first All-Star—championed the team with twelve other New York heroes in their brightly colored costumes, patrolling the neighborhoods and stopping the real crimes they saw every day. But then there’d been that one apocalypse where the first All-Star had been ripped in half above the city, raining blood and guts and cosmic starshine down on everyone. After that, everything had changed. Tony had decided life was too short to waste, and enrolled to take classes at CUNY, studying graphic design. But then work got in the way, and he and Marianne were always fighting, and there was Dante to think about. It wasn’t long before dreams of a career with computers had been traded for contentment selling shoes, and not much longer ‘til he was—as Marianne put it—that “damn burger flipper of an absent father.”

Tony’s Sabado Gigante marathon was interrupted when the screen momentarily froze to allow a small pop-up window—the sort of pop-up that appeared for storm warnings and bomb threats and invading armies of North Korean lobotomechs.

He closed the pop-up, continued watching his show, and fell asleep on the couch with his beer still unfinished.

When he awoke the next morning, the beer bottle was empty and the tablet had drunk itself to an early death.

He cursed, bemoaning another loss he couldn’t afford. He got ready for work, needing to hurry to make the lunch shift and help train the new girl. Outside his window, he heard screaming, the honking of New York traffic with the volume turned up, and an eerie humming sound he couldn’t place. He ignored them, buttoning on his pants and grabbing a pack of Oreos to eat on the way to work.

Outside the streets were filled bumper-to-bumper with drivers honking and shouting. Some people had gotten out of their vehicles to look and see how bad the traffic was. Others had just gotten out and fled on foot. The skies above were black—not overcast, but altered into a rippling obsidian lake that bent slightly inward like some cosmic meniscus.

But the trains worked just fine, despite delays. As he rode to work, he tried not to think that this might actually be the end of everything (or at least the end of him). He should be spending the day with Dante, not going to work. All he wanted to do was sit with his son on his lap watching cartoons and hear Dante’s laugh. But if tomorrow came, he’d need his paycheck.

Even if it didn’t, the collection agencies would still hound whatever was left of his corpse, terrorizing Marianne and Dante to collect on his debts.

The train emerged from a tunnel, and he saw that a black rain had started, inky drops splattering against the train car. Above, the dark orb had swollen, engorging into the eye of some malevolent god watching them at the hour of Judgment.

He got off at his stop, trying not to look up, and when he arrived at NuremBurger, he found Schulze, Trish, and a pair of servers already there. He greeted them, ignored Schulze’s comments asking where he’d been (like the answer wasn’t obvious), and began the day’s work, showing Trish how to use the fryer and prep the stove and the two dozen other basic tasks to start the day. She worked diligently and learned quickly, and at one point he made the mistake of praising her with a “good work, but you can take it easy. We aren’t saving the world, just working the kitchen.” She spent the next hour nattering on about how hard supers worked to save the world, and how the Fifth Dimensionalists had undermined everything with their chronaliminal engineering by bringing on an apocalypse that chronocops like Time Cube and Panthea said wasn’t due for three centuries. The girl was a cape-chaser alight, and rambled about superteams like the Twelve Stripes, U-Knighted, and the Repairmen. Then she embarked on a tangent about the hero Numen, how his suffering was underappreciated and no one understood him like she did. He remembered being in high school, watching girls obsess over capes and boybands, and figured it was just her age. Thankfully, only four customers came before noon, so it was a slow day.

Then as he finished sizzling a WurstBurger, there was a strange keening and the burger began to shake and–

The kitchen exploded!

And time slowed.

Tony was knocked from his feet as the floor split. The ceiling imploded and he rose to meet it. Gas pipes splintered in fiery gouts. Pain raked his arm—flying debris—and as flaming cutlery and shattered cinderblocks enveloped him, he realized this was the end.

He thought of Dante.

And then a force enfolded him, pressing close to him with a warm forcefulness and a moment later, it was over.

A super had him.

He looked up, seeing the restaurant in ruins. Two supers—one he recognized and one he didn’t—were embattled with a horde of what appeared to be car-sized insects, like spiked arachnids. A woman dressed like a Celtic warrior in blue-glowing warpaint bashed her fists through carapaces, riding through the wreckage aback a shining horse-sized battle-pig. Tony vaguely recalled this woman was Coventina, some British goddess reincarnate and involved in a number of controversial transatlantic security arrangements established in the Thatcher years. The other super wore too-tight black spandex and was gratuitously backflipping over the gargantuan death beetles and shooting bone spikes from his fingertips. The spikes pierced their hides, shattering shells amidst spurts of viscous gore.

Above, the sky had opened into a gaping mouth that consumed half the space between horizons, fangs and tentacles and more bugs drooling from it toward the earth.

Sirens blared. People screamed. Another super flew overhead, riding a nimbus of what Tony guessed must be nanomachines, black nanite clouds extending from his palms to catch falling debris. Groups of heroes soared high above, wrestling with tentacles the size of skyscrapers, bright blasts of light and flame flashing from their fists. A blurred streak whizzed through the streets, clearing the roads of debris as an unidentified speedster shot past, and moments later, the sirens grew louder, emergency vehicles traversing the now-clear streets.

Vaguely, Tony realized he didn’t know who had saved him. He looked around, saw Schulze standing with a perplexed look, one server beside him and both splattered with gore.

But there was no sign of his rescuer.

Somewhere in the debris of what used to be the NuremBurger kitchen (and was now a flaming outdoor garbage pile being used for gladiatorial combat), somewhere under the broken brickwork and metal shards and scattered contents of the walk-in freezer, was Trish.

With horror, he looked back up at the chunky red stains smeared across Schulze, and wondered how much of that could be her. Schulze opened his mouth and closed it again wordlessly. The server cried, shaking.

Coventina leapt from her mount and delivered a roundhouse kick to the last of the bugs, catapulting its broken body into the horizon. Then she remounted and rode away toward some other threat, her companion already gone.

A shadow fell across Tony, and he looked up.

Floating above him was another hero he recognized—All-Star’s teen sidekick, Americana. She just hovered there for a second, her muscular slim frame exaggerated by the red-white-and-blue uniform that seemed cut to emphasize more assets than just her patriotism. She flashed him a familiar freckle-faced smile, and he smiled back, waving to show his gratitude.

Then she was off, darting into the air without any regard for Newton’s Laws. Somewhere above the rooftops, he saw her join with a group of a dozen other patriotically dressed supers helmed by what even Tony could not mistake for anyone other than All-Star. As one, the group shot straight up toward the open jaws above.

Typical heroes.

Still, looking about him, he could not deny the immensity of what was happening. The world was a blur of screams and debris and mangled bodies. The heavens had been swallowed by hell.

He realized what he needed to do. What a real hero would do—not some steroids-and-cosmic-power super— but the kind of hero the world actually needed in times like this.

“Mr. Schulze!” he shouted. The old man stared at him, blinking in half-recognition. The man was probably in shock. Hell, Tony probably was too, but it’s not like it’d be the first time. “Mr. Schulze!” he repeated, louder.

“What is it, Tony?” Schulze asked, and Tony realized it was the first time the man hadn’t called him “Antonio.”

“I’m going,” Tony said.

“What?”

“I’m getting out of here.”

“You can’t,” Schulze said, his focus apparently clearing. “The police. They’ll need to interview you, to take a statement about the damages.”

“The police have better things to do right now,” he said, gesturing toward the events unfolding all around them. “Besides, there’s somewhere I need to be right now.”

“You need to be here. This is your job!” Schulze shouted, sounding hysterical, as though if Tony left now, then he truly would have lost everything.

“My job is to be a dad. My boy needs to know there’s a real hero there to look after him when the world is falling apart.”

With that, Tony turned his back on the older man, walking through the chaos to find Dante.

Author’s note: Do you remember that scene at the end of the first Avengers film where the heroes all get schawarma? It’s a great scene, but what was going on in the personal lives of the restaurant workers that they stayed at work amidst an alien invasion blowing up the city? And what do people grow accustomed to in a world with such horrors and wonders as superhero comics present? This story explores some possible answers to those questions while showcasing the struggles (both absurd and very familiar) of life in the shadow of superheroes.

Theo Kogod is a teacher, scholar, wanderer, and the Resident Writer for 3 Feet Left. He has spent time living in Greece, Japan, and the United States. He currently resides in North Carolina with his two cats, an amazing spouse, and a small mountain of books.

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DP FICTION #30A: “For Now, Sideways” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

The text pings her mech’s computer out of nowhere. Victory is ours.

Holst lowers her railguns, steps back from the blown-apart husks of the birdshells. Can’t wipe the cracked viewscreen clean or the streaks of blood dried onto the rivets. Her lungs burn. For years, she’s felt like she’s suffocating—no oxygen left, just smoke and dust. All around her, on the desert’s edge, there’s nothing but sand and corpses. Mech, human, ghost. Metal and flesh and feathers mangled in ugly shapes like bad graffiti on the planet’s skin.

This can’t be it.

She scans the field, hoping she’s in radio contact with whatever remains of her squad—and remembers that she’s the only one left.

When the birdshells came, they looked like dusty gray ribbons, the outlines of doves. They were hollow: clouds speckled in uneven feathers dried and brittle. Up close, they had razors in their beaks, hooked claws strong enough to rend flesh to bone, and a soul-rending coo that broadcast from empty eye sockets.

And they came in millions. Swarms led by queens shaped like the ghosts of peacocks dipped in acid. Where they came, they devoured. Settlements disappeared, some swallowed in flameless heat from the phoenix-tanks, some torn into confetti, some just…gone.

Gill was in one of the first camps that fell under the birdshells. Holst got a text—I’ll meet you back at Alpha Base tomorrow—moments before the airwaves went dead. She never found her husband’s body.

Holst de-suits at basecamp, tries not to flinch at the screaming. It’s joy, she knows, logically. But it’s still too loud. Not like the insulated thrum of her mech, the grind of hydraulics and the vibration of gunfire. She limps on her cramped bio-leg and the badly-fitted prosthetic.

The bunker smells of old sweat and mold and sour beer. And the birds, always the fucking birds. That dry, cinnamon odor that stains her dreams and wakes her up choking. She drops to her cot, eyes half closed to acclimate to the space. The bunker’s small, like all the camp units along the northern perimeter of Eau Seven, but it feels massive after months in a three-ton cage of weaponry and armor.

“Holst!”

Her head snaps up, her hand on her sidearm.

It’s Burbank, another mech-bod. Burbank lost half her face and both arms; her cybernetics are clunky, metal and plastic scrap fused into bio-tissue. The arms are too big, throwing her balance off, and the face-plate has no articulation. Just a slab of blue against dark skin. In a mech, it doesn’t matter.

“Not gonna join the celebration?” Burbank asks.

Holst spent the last five years fighting. Lived inside her mech almost that whole time. Somewhere out there, she’d find Gill. As long as there was war, she had a reason to fight. To find him. The words victory and won are empty slates. She’s forgotten the dictionary definitions. “Dunno.”

Burbank’s half-smile wavers. “With the swarmqueens dead, Earth will send transports now. We get to go home.”

Holst stares back, blank. “What home?”

There’s this quote she remembers, printed in gaudy blue boldface on the inside of her helmet strap: Live to fight another day, motherfucker.

She ran her fingers over the words until they rubbed off on her skin, and she’d refuel and press forward.

Gill used to crash her dreams, fierce smile always fixed, always bright. Hey, babe. You coming to pick me up, yeah?

Yeah, Holst could never say.

But he hasn’t been around in a while. She lost her digital photos when a power-surge ruptured her mem-chip implant and she ripped it free of her scalp before it electrocuted her. Every day she went on the offensive, hunting the birdshells. No retreat. No real plan. Find the nests, torch them. Metal and fire worked on ghosts.

Somewhere out in the ruins of this world, Gill is waiting.

Holst can’t sleep. She lies dry-eyed in her bunk, listening to the other soldiers sing or fuck or laugh. It’s suddenly more alien than the birdshells. All she’s done is fight and lose. Lose and fight.

She and Gill left everything behind when they boarded the transport ship to this new world, this promised land free of pollution and disease, this world where they could have their own land, their own house, their own lives. Gill wanted kids, and was willing to find a surrogate. There were plenty of other women who had wombs.

She can’t picture what an Earth transport looks like. What faces unscarred by the war look like. What tomorrow looks like.

There’s never been a tomorrow since the war began.

A week drags by. Holst is out of her mech for longer than she’s been in years. Orders trickle in from fractured command posts. Stats. Lists of survivors. Delta Camp risks sending up a satellite to map the terrain; no one’s been airborne since the war.

Longer lists follow. Lists of the identified dead.

Burbank gives her the news: Gill’s found.

His body was identified by dental records in the mass grave covered in birdshell feathers ten miles from where he went missing.

“I’m sorry,” Burbank says, but Holst just rolls over on her cot. She can’t dream if she doesn’t sleep.

The bitter ocean laps at Holst’s mech feet. Wet sand sucks down the armor weight. She can walk forward, deeper until the pressure breaks her seals and pops the oxygen tanks like blisters. Just disappear away from air and light and sand.

“Hey, Holst.”

She switches the rearview cameras on. Burbank’s mech is up the beach, a pillar of metal against the gray horizon.

“Going somewhere?” Burbank’s hatch creaks open and she drops from the mech. Her bare feet sink into sand.

“Dunno.” Where is there to go, when the war is done?

Burbank’s buzzed head is sweat-smeared and Holst remembers Burbank used to be damn proud of her hair. Back when they had time for hygiene and Burbank had articulation in her hands. She has a sudden urge to use her sleeve and wipe the grime from Burbank’s skin.

“What are you doing here?” Holst asks.

Burbank sways, her version of a shrug. “Thought you might want some company.”

The chapped leather of her headrest scratches her scalp. “Not now.”

“‘Kay.” Burbank plops down in the sand halfway between her mech and Holst’s. “It’s gonna be at least a year before we see those transport ships anyway.”

Holst licks salt off her lip. It’s stifling in her mech since the AC unit shorted before she left base. She used to be an engineer; she can fix it. Not sure why she should, when the sea is cold.

When she first suited up, it was in the initial panic after the original swarm came. She didn’t run tests, just plugged her neural implants into the mech and grabbed the controls. She needed to find Gill.

“I wonder if my old job’s still open back on Earth,” Burbank says. “I was in accounting. Hell of a transfer from a desk to mech.” She leans on her elbows. “I had this CO who used to tell us, ‘if you can’t go forward, go sideways.’ Back’s never really an option.”

“Your CO make it?” Holst asks.

“She saved my ass when the second swarm hit.”

That wave cost Holst her company. She chugged along the desert for a solid month on her own, hunting nests, so furious she couldn’t see straight. The burn in her lungs started then–that inability to suck in breath, to shunt the pain aside. She’s been suffocating since.

“I lost most of my squad just before the ping caught me that we…won. I–” Burbank slams a heavy hand into the sand. Grit sprays like a bullet impacting a hollow bird. “Fuck. I really want a drink, but I got no one left.”

Holst kills the camera.

She still hears Burbank’s voice.

“Share a drink before you go, Holst?”

The canteen’s filled with alcohol distilled from tubers, one of the few plants left after the birdshells chewed up the world. It’s awful, but it gets a body drunk.

“To the ones we lost,” Burbank says. “I’ll say their names every day long as I remember.”

Holst takes another swig. “To Gill,” she says. First time she’s spoken his name aloud since the news. She imagines him toasting her back. I’m fine, he’ll say. Keep on keeping on, babe.

Okay, she’ll say. For a while longer, she’ll try.

Holst’s mech, left in thigh-deep water, topples in slow motion, sucked down with the rising tide. She watches it and doesn’t flinch. Holst’s fingertips brush Burbank’s metal digits as she passes the canteen back.

Burbank nods to the water. “You want me to fish it out?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

Burbank lifts the canteen in salute.

Holst’s mech disappears under the foam-licked waves.

She breathes.

Author’s Note: This was inspired by a prompt for a Codex contest (I can’t recall the exact seed for it, alas!) and was further developed by my love for mechs and interest in exploring the aftermath of massive events. I’ve read so many stories that are centered on the conflict (the war, or Plot Event, or whatever) and I always wondered what happens when that plot is over. Who gets to go home and who can’t?

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor is a non-binary, queer fiction writer from Minnesota, where they live with their two cats. Merc is the author of two collections, So You Want To Be A Robot (2017) and Friends For Robots (2021), as well the novella The Wolf Among the Wild Hunt. They have had short stories published in such fine venues as Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, and more. Visit their website: mercfennwolfmoor.com for more, or follow them on Twitter @Merc_Wolfmoor.

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DP Fiction #29B: “The Shadow Over His Mouth” by Aidan Doyle

Greetings From Transylvania!

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
7th July 2016.

I’m in vampire country! That’s right, I’m in Brasov, in Romania. Now that I’ve finished university, I’ve decided it’s time to take my food blog on the road.

I was supposed to start my adventure in Paris, but a storm meant my flight was diverted to Transylvania. The airline staff said it would be at least a week before flights to Paris resumed, so I’m going to make the most of my time in Eastern Europe.

Brasov has its own version of a Hollywood-style sign on the hill overlooking the city. It also has some really narrow alleyways that make Melbourne’s laneways look big. Nowhere to hide if the vampires come after you. 🙂

I had somehow gained the impression that Eastern European hostels are full of beautiful women trying to lure foreigners to gruesomely erotic deaths. Instead I found myself sharing a dorm room with a creepy old Dutch guy, who must have been more than fifty years old. The hideous actuality of his non-Euclidean snoring kept me awake all night.

Yesterday morning I went on a tour organized by the hostel. We visited Bran Castle, the so-called Dracula Castle, but it actually has little to do with Vlad Tepes, who inspired the Dracula legend. There were a couple of Spanish guys on the tour who had each brought along a set of plastic red vampire teeth to wear when posing for photos. The Dutch guy glared at them and kept muttering that nosferatu was no laughing matter.

I had arranged to meet the Spanish guys to go out for drinks in the evening, but they didn’t turn up. When I checked their dorm room, all of their stuff was gone, except for the red plastic teeth lying on top of their pillows. They could have at least told me they were checking out.

This morning I took the train to Sighisoara and had lunch at Casa Dracula, the house in which Vlad Tepes was born. It’s now a tourist restaurant. I know some food bloggers who refuse to eat in restaurants where anything on the menu is described with fewer than three adjectives, but I appreciate simple food. I had a steak skewered on a little wooden stake and covered in tomato sauce (ketchup for my North American readers). The meat was bloodier than I prefer and the sauce had an eldritch tang I couldn’t identify, but it’s not every day you get to eat a steak on a stake in Dracula’s house.

The Dutch guy was in the restaurant as well and glared at me while I was Instagramming the steak. Old people don’t understand the importance of documenting your meals. Unfortunately there was something wrong with my phone and the photos all came out blurry.

When I got back to Brasov, I went on a vampire walking tour. The Dutch guy was there again, but at least the guide was super cute. She had these indescribably quasi-hypnotic cerulean eyes that I could have stared at for immeasurable eons. Halfway through the tour, two guys in cloaks leaped from the roof of a building and landed next to the Dutch guy. Before anyone could even take a photo, the cloaks had dragged Dutchie down an alley. I wish the guide had given us some warning, so we had a chance to video the whole thing. I was expecting the Dutch guy to join us later, but he didn’t return. I guess the tour company must have planted him on the walk.

When I got back to the hostel all of the Dutch guy’s stuff was gone. I was pleased about the idea of getting a good night’s sleep, but I discovered an envelope and a book hidden under my pillow. The envelope was addressed to me and contained a letter penned in scarlet ink.

Dear Barry,
Dark forces are gathering. You must embrace your family’s legacy. Only you can stop an unholy alliance forming between Eastern Europe‘s vampires and the protoplasmic fish people. If I fail in my mission to train you, use this book as your guide.

The letter was unsigned.

The book bore the title, Eldritch Planet: A Guide to the World’s Arcane Secrets (Fifth Edition Completely Revised and Updated) and promised to reveal the places other tourists don’t go. It was bound in paper recycled from health food restaurant menus and exuded a blasphemous odor of stale kale. It contained reviews of exclusive hotels hidden deep in the Carpathian Mountains, antediluvian ruined temples untouched by mortal man for centuries, and restaurants with food so indescribably tasty that a single bite would drive lesser food bloggers insane. I found an entry on a restaurant in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia that the book claimed was the world’s greatest seafood restaurant. I searched online and couldn’t discover any mention of Eldritch Planet or the restaurant. A restaurant that other people haven’t written about is a food blogger’s dream come true. It was then that I realized what my true destiny was. I will visit this restaurant, brave the monotonously aquatic nature of its menu, and upload photos of its meals to social media. As usual, I’d appreciate it if you share this post with your friends and family.

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Greetings From Bucharest

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
10 July 2016

I’m in Bucharest now, heading south towards Macedonia. (Would you believe one of my exes broke up with me because I didn’t prefix the country’s name with Former Yugoslav Republic of?) This time I’m sharing a room with a wide-eyed German man who looks as though he escaped from the set of Hipsters Gone Wild, a creature more beard than man.

I’ve only stayed in a few hostels, but I’ve already met more than my fair share of eccentric characters. Presented for your edification is the:

Youth Hostel Wandering Monster Table
Roll 1d8
1 – A German complaining about the hostel’s lack of cleanliness.
2 – A bemused Japanese who speaks little English.
3 – An Australian who wants to tell you about his fuckin’ sick pub crawl.
4 – An American worshipping at the altar of Rick Steves.
5 – A Canadian who has covered every inch of their luggage in Canadian flags.
6 – A young woman terrified to talk to anyone because she has watched one too many Liam Neeson films.
7 – A guy who refuses to eat at any restaurant mentioned in a tourist guide because he wants an “authentic” experience.
8 – People having sex in the communal showers.

I wanted to get some sleep, but the manic German almost had a fit when he saw my copy of Eldritch Planet.

“Where did you get that book?” he hissed.

“A friend gave it to me,” I told him.

“It’s a trap!” the German pronounced. “They’re sending you to your doom.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you? You haven’t peered beyond the veil that separates the realm of man from the beasts that lurk in the shadows. Everything changed after some of the Eastern European countries changed their immigration laws. Now most foreigners need a letter of invitation before they can get a visa.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“They’re inviting visitors into the country. That renders them powerless against vampires. The whole of Eastern Europe is crawling with bloodsuckers. And now they’re trying to make an alliance with the deep ones. They’ve decided that keeping forbidden texts hidden is counterproductive when they want more accursed creatures to walk the earth. Their goal is to spread dark and terrible knowledge as far as possible, so they’re trying to take control of people with social media influence.”

The German was quite mad, but it was nice to be recognized as a blogger of some import.

“They’re going to lure you to Lake Ohrid, one of the oldest and deepest lakes in Europe,” the German said. I had kept my destination a secret. I was going to ask how he knew, but the swarthy hostel manager came into our room. “There’s a phone call for you,” he said to the German. The German followed him out of the room.

I waited ten minutes for him to come back, but then a wild ululation echoed throughout the hostel.

I dashed out of my room. A Korean man emerged from the bathroom, looking shocked. I’ve encountered some unspeakably eldritch hostel bathrooms in my travels, but I suspected something more was going on.

“He’s dead,” the Korean man said.

The swarthy hostel manager appeared. “Go back to your rooms, everyone. I’ll clean up the mess.”

It turns out Bucharest has a bad problem with wild dogs. A dog got into the hostel and killed the German guy while he was taking a dump. What a way to go!

I went back to my room and made sure the door was shut and the window locked. I didn’t get any sleep that night. I kept hearing squeaking sounds in the darkness, as though there were rats in the walls.

I made sure to give the hostel a one-star review on Trip Advisor. From now on I’m going to stay in hotels, even if it does blow my budget.

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Greetings from Lake Ohrid

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
10 July 2016

Traveling by bus in Eastern Europe feels as though you are crossing an unimaginable abyss of time and space, but I finally made it to Lake Ohrid and checked into a hotel in a lakeside village.

I went for a walk along the shore in the late afternoon and looked for the restaurant. I tried asking some of the locals for directions, but they muttered at me in a primitive, guttural language and hurried on their way. It’s not good enough. These days if you want to attract tourists, people need to speak English.

I persevered and eventually found The House of Fin. The restaurant was housed in a rudely fashioned Cyclopean building, but Eldritch Planet claims it’s the world’s greatest seafood restaurant. Since it was early and I was the only customer, I got a table with a great view of the lake.

The waiter was a pale-skinned man with bulbous eyes and an elongated head. A most peculiar odor clung to him, as though he had doused himself in cheap cologne, but at least he spoke English. He handed me three menus – the main menu, the wine list and the squid menu. I’m not a big fan of tentacles, so I focused on the main menu.

“Is it legal to eat penguin in Macedonia?” I asked.

The waiter nodded. “Our friends from Antarctica bring us the freshest penguins. They are lightly steamed and served with a garnish of kale.”

Goddamn kale has even made it to Macedonia. “You have toad in the hole on the menu? Doesn’t that have sausages in it?”

“That’s the British version.” The waiter smiled. “Our toad in the hole is more authentic.”

“What do you recommend?” I asked.

“The king prawns in yellow sauce are my personal favorite,” the waiter replied. “The jellied eel is superlative, and of course one must try our local specialty, the deepfish.”

“There aren’t any prices on the menus,” I pointed out. I hate being ripped off in tourist scams.

“Our prices are most reasonable,” the waiter assured me.

I would have preferred actual numbers, but I decided to trust him. In my travels I’ve learned that the more you are open to people, the more they will give you in return. “I’ll have the eel and the deepfish.”

It was a good decision. The jellied eel’s flesh was so tender and so bursting with flavor that explosions of indescribable ecstasy ricocheted around my mouth.

The deepfish was served on a bed of lettuce and glowed with a pale, green luminescence. “Why is the fish glowing?”

“Our chef’s special sauce,” the waiter replied.

Other bloggers would have fled in abject terror at effulgent fish, but I’m brave enough to try things beyond their limited comprehension. I took a bite of the deepfish.

The flavor was vaster and more primal than anything experienced by man since the decadent Gods of Taste walked upon this earth. My mouth achieved a state of transcendence and I was transported beyond the realm of food bloggers to a time before the Age of Social Media. I dwelled a long time in that place, savoring each bite and the unbridled flavor that coursed through my newly potent body.

“We are going to prepare a special dessert for you,” the waiter said after I finished the deepfish.

The deepfish had been so filling. “I couldn’t possibly eat another thing.”

“You must try it,” the waiter said. “It will blow your mind. It will take some time to prepare, so please be patient.”

“Of course.”

I’m so excited about my discovery that I wrote this post while I’m waiting for dessert. The food here deserves to be shared with the world. I might even be able to get a book deal. Barry Lovecraft Presents The Secrets of the House of Fin.

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Help!

Posted by Barry Lovecraft

10 July 2016

OMG! OMG!

I’m locked in the bathroom. Please, you have to send help!

The waiter wheeled out a huge coffin-like covered dish. I thought there was no way I was going to be able to eat all of what was under there. Then he opened the lid.

The image of the creature beneath has been forever seared into my mind. I fear I shall never experience a single moment of peace ever again, knowing there are things like that in our world.

The squid-like creature was a mass of writhing tentacles bathed in an unearthly eldritch light and emitted a malodorous, pungent, fetid odor. Most terrible of all was its swarthy human-like face. Its unutterably hideous eyes stared at me with a malignant purpose. A vast alien intelligence, against which no spiritual firewall could hope to withstand, probed the inner reaches of my mind.

The pustule-covered tentacles reached for me.

I leaped from my chair and dashed to the bathroom, locking myself within.

There is a terrible knocking at the door. I fear my time on this earth is almost at an end. Please share this post with the relevant law enforcement agencies.

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Melbourne Gathering

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
10 August 2016

I’m sorry for the silence and the website problems. There was an issue with my host, but that’s been resolved. I’m back in Melbourne again. Some of you might think travel has changed me, but I’m still the same Barry Lovecraft you knew. Travel opens your mind to new possibilities and lets you perceive formerly hidden realities. The only reason I look a little different is that I now have a mustache. Any suggestions that it is because I have something to hide will be treated with the contempt they deserve. I’m going to prepare a special banquet to share my newfound knowledge of the culinary arts. A feast that will never be forgotten. Please tell all your friends and family that they need to attend. I must gather all my followers.

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Author’s Note: I was having a discussion with a friend about how there were so many Lovecraft parodies around. The conversation later moved on to the topic of restaurant reviews and I decided that a Lovecraftian food blogger would make an interesting character.

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer. His short stories have been published in places such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside. He has been shortlisted for the Aurealis, Ditmar, and XYZZY awards. He has visited more than 100 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea.

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DP FICTION #29A: “Monster of the Soup Cans” by Elizabeth Barron

“I created a monster the other day, but I’m trying not to think about it. These things usually take care of themselves, don’t they?”

The scientist’s words echoed against the grey walls of her tiny kitchen laboratory, while the orangutan she was training to speak just stared at her with a bored expression, like he’d heard all this before.

Even the fluorescent frogs, hopping around in their tank above the microwave, looked bored whenever the scientist talked about her problems. She’d created them to cheer herself up, but there was only so much that bright colors could do.

The orangutan’s speech training was a failure so far, which was actually a relief to the scientist. If the orangutan ever did start to talk, he would no doubt feel entitled to offer his own opinions and tell the scientist exactly what her issues were and that he was done listening to her babble instead of resolving them. Conversing with a silent orangutan was just easier.

“I put the monster in the cupboard,” said the scientist. “I didn’t know what else to do. I know, I’m so scattered. I try not to be, but I’m getting worse, aren’t I?”

The orangutan hooted and puffed out his lips, and then started taking apart the coffee maker. The scientist hoped he meant, “Why worry? You’re just fine the way you are, this monster thing will work itself out.”

The monster waited patiently in the kitchen cupboard, rearranging all of the scientist’s jars and cereal boxes and building little towers out of the soup cans—a tower out of tomato, another out of minestrone, another out of corn chowder. The monster was hungry, but he didn’t dare eat any of the scientist’s soup. He didn’t want to upset her. The monster only ate food from the back of the cupboard, things she wouldn’t miss—dusty cereals left behind by ancient boyfriends, or fancy dried pastas brought by guests who never came back.

The monster felt like he knew everything about the scientist, just from watching through the crack in the cupboard door and listening to her talk to the other experiments, the ones she could stand to look at. But surely the fluorescent frogs and the orangutan didn’t know that her favorite soup was minestrone, or that she always left her keys in the same place and then forgot where they were, sparking a frantic search whenever she left the house (which she hardly ever did).

The monster liked this about her. She was always nearby, even though she never went near the cupboard door. The monster caught a blurry peek of his reflection in the dusty metal lid of a soup can and shuddered. No wonder she wanted to forget him.

The scientist busied the rest of the day away with observing the fluorescent frogs and finger-painting with the orangutan, but soon it was late and she got hungry. It was Monday, she realized with relief, the day she ate Nepalese take-out, so she had a practical excuse not to go into the kitchen cupboard.

The monster would be fine for another day, or even longer, she told herself as she searched for her keys. In fact, the longer she put off dealing with him, the easier it would be—he was probably just sleeping anyway and wouldn’t want to be disturbed.

All reasonable creatures, she’d often concluded, preferred to be alone—it was as natural to her as the thing in the cupboard was not.

The scientist finally found her keys on top of the organ cooler. “One of these days, I’ll remember where I left them. Tomorrow, I swear it. It’ll be a new day.”

The orangutan rolled his eyes.

The monster held his breath all the while she was gone, wishing that he’d gotten up the nerve to tell her where her keys were before she’d worked herself into a panic.

One of these days, he would be brave enough to say something, and she’d be so grateful she might even look at him.

When the scientist returned home, the monster pressed against the crack in the cupboard door, watching with wide and hopeful eyes. She looked crestfallen, an expression he’d seen on her only once before—when she’d created him.

“I can’t believe the Nepalese place was closed,” she said to the fluorescent frogs. “I was really hungry for yak curry too.”

The fluorescent frogs blinked their pink and yellow eyes, and the scientist hoped they meant, “You could eat soup two days ahead of schedule, but you’d have to deal with you-know-what . . . better to go hungry. You could stand to lose a pound or two anyway.”

The scientist started to agree over the sound of her growling stomach, just as the cupboard door began to creak open. Her heart raced as a cloudy grey eye blinked and then recoiled. Delicate fingers reached out and handed her a metal can, then closed the cupboard door with barely a sound.

The scientist turned the can over in her hands, unsure of what to think—how had the monster known that minestrone was her favorite? Probably just a coincidence, she thought. She walked out of the kitchen, turning the lights off as she left.

Author’s Note: A struggle to connect with others and break from the normal writing/class/take-out routine inspired this story. It’s lonely being trapped in the cupboard, but it’s just as hard to have no other company but your half-formed creations. I’m much better at letting them out of the cupboard and into the light nowadays.

Elizabeth Barron lives in the dark, football fan-infested forests of Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has a degree in creative writing from Oberlin College and an MFA from Hamline University. She and her partner have a dog and three cats that really should know better than to sneak into the cupboards. She has also been published at Empyreome, Fiction on the Web and The Fable Online.

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

DP Fiction #28B: “Regarding the Robot Raccoons Attached to the Hull of My Ship” by Rachael K. Jones and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2160-11-11

Dear Ziza,

You already know what this is about, don’t you, dear Sister? The robot raccoons I found clamped along my ship’s hull during this cycle’s standard maintenance sweep?

Oh, come on. Really? You know I invented that hull sculler tech, right? They’ve got my corporate logo etched into their beady red eyes so my name flashes on all the walls when their power is low. I admit some of your upgrades were… novel. Like the exoshell design–I’ll never understand your raccoon obsession. Impractical, but points for style. I hadn’t thought you could fit a diamond drill into a model smaller than a Pomeranian’s skull, so congrats on that. Not that they made much progress chewing through my double-thick hull, but I’ll give credit where credit’s due.

Still, it was unsisterly of you, and it’s not going to stop me from dropping the terraforming nuke when I get to Mars. Come to grips with reality, sister: you’re in the wrong. You always have been, ever since we were girls. Especially since Mumbai accepted my proposal for Martian settlement. Not yours.

I’m sending back the robot raccoons in an unmanned probe. Back, because yes, I’m still leagues and leagues ahead of you. I only lost a day cleaning up the hull scullers. I’ve kept the diamond drills. I bet they’ll chew right through that Martian rock.

I’ve also included a dozen white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, because I know it’s your birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday!

Now go home.

Love your sister,

Anita

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2160-11-12

Dear Anita,

Remember that summer when Father dropped us off at the northern rim of the Poona Crater on Mars? Alone. For two weeks. “This rustic camping trip will be a great learning experience,” he said. “My precious daughters will bond.”

When I learned that there were no pre-fab facilities and that we were responsible for erecting our own dwelling, sanitation pod, and lab, I started plotting ways to poison our father. You, on the other hand, I am still convinced, were determined to thoroughly enjoy the experience just to spite me.

But Father was a conservationist, and now that I am older, I can appreciate that he was trying to instill that same spirit in us. “Not all life jumps out and bites you in the butt,” he used to love to say. And we learned the truth of that when we unearthed a family of as-yet-undiscovered garbatrites in the red dust on one of our sand treks.

We spent hours watching them under high magnification under the STEHM, trying to communicate with them, recording their activities and creating hypotheses about the meanings of their habits. I have to admit, there was a point when I stopped cursing father and started to secretly thank him. And where I sort of, kind of, could maybe see why you weren’t so bad after all.

I don’t think I’d ever seen you so dedicated to anything before this. You missed meals and stayed up throughout the night trying to communicate with the elder garbatrite. The one you named Benny. Exhausted, you fell asleep at your desk and left the infrared light on too long and effectively fried the poor critter. You cried for days and you even held a formal funeral for Benny, something his fellow garbatrites didn’t seem too pleased about.

With that in mind, how could you possibly want to drop a terraforming nuke on a planet you and I both know is already teeming with life? Creating a new habitable world only has merits if it’s not already inhabited.

If you won’t see reason, then I’ll just have to make it impossible for you. The Council for Martian Settlement may have accepted your proposal, but let me remind you that I’ve never been keen on following the rules.

So, you found the hull scullers, eh? I knew those diamonds would distract you from my real plan. You’ve always been so… materialistic. But hey, someone has to be.

On another note, the cookies were to die for! They were even better than Mother’s, but I’ll never tell her that. I really appreciate you thinking of me. I have a proposal to make. On our next monthly meal exchange, I’ll make your favorite, a big old pot of Anasazi beans and sweet buttered cornbread, if you’ll send more of those cookies.

XOXO

Ziza

P.S. My sweet raccoonie-woonies, Bobo and Cow, liked the cookies too. They also send their love.

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2160-11-15

Sister:

Come now, Ziza. Let’s not make me out to be some kind of villain. Of course I remember that summer. I remember how we licked the condensation inside our lab windows to stay hydrated because Father’s Orion Scout childhood romanticized survival stories. It’s the real reason we’re such die hard coffee drinkers nowadays. He ruined the taste of water for us.

And I remember the garbatrites. How could I ever forget? That dusty red boulder we found in the sandstorm provided just enough shelter to pitch our emergency pod while we waited out the squall. Nothing to do but talk with each other, or play with the STEHM. Which meant we chose the STEHM, obviously. It’s the closest look I’ve ever gotten at you, all those disgusting many-legged organisms crawling on your skin and hair, in your saliva, your earwax. You’ve always had an affinity for vermin.

But I’ll be forever grateful you suggested taking samples around the boulder. When we first saw the garbatrites, their tiny little dwellings drilled into rock like mesa cities–that might be the closest I’ve ever felt to you, each of us taking one eyepiece on the STEHM, our damp cheeks pressed together, our smiles one long continuous arc. When the light brightened or dimmed, they danced in little conga lines. We weren’t sure if it was art, or language. Is there really a difference?

There’s something I realized when Benny died. The sort of revelation you only have when you’re nudging together an atomic coffin beneath an electron microscope with tiny diamond tweezers just three nanometers wide: life is short. Life is painfully short, full of suffering and tragedy and wide, empty spaces. And those rare spots hospitable to life are just boulders tossed into an endless red desert, created by accident or coincidence. The only real good we can do in life is to spread out those boulders, minimize the deserts where we find them. Make a garden from dust. Plant our atomic coffins and let them bloom. Terraform whole planets, so we’ll have more than just the blue boulder of Earth.

That’s what you never understood, dear sister. It’s why when you spent your youth chasing pretty men, I betrothed myself to science, burned my hopes of human love in the furnaces of my ambition. Do you remember when Asante, my poor besotted lab assistant, proposed to me at the Tanzanian Xenobiology Conference? How I laughed! As if any children he could give me would approach the impact my terraforming nuke will make on our species. Never forget, Ziza, that this mission is my life’s work, my legacy. You will not stop me.

In other news, I got the Anasazi beans and cornbread, still warm and fresh in their shipping pod. How did you know I had the craving? That was a kindness. I remembered you while making salaat today.

I was less pleased about the virus installed in the shipping pod’s warming program. Nice try, but I saw through that in about five seconds. Here’s a tip: next time, beta test it on all the shipboard systems I invented, not just the navigation. My sanitation program does more than filter my own crap.

I’m sending you an e-manual on Programming 101, and an ordering catalogue for Anita Enterprises in case you’d like to support the family business.

XOXOXO,

Anita

P.S. Go home.

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2160-11-28

Anita,

It’s been nearly two weeks since we last spoke, and of course, you know why. When you told me to go home, I knew that you were serious, but I never thought you’d resort to using the health and welfare of our dear mother as bait to get me to turn around and head back to earth.

I’m still trying to figure out how you managed to simulate for video not only our mother’s countenance, darkened and marred by some mysterious illness, but her voice, the cadence like smooth stones tumbling in water and her accent. When she pleaded for me to return home, telling me that she was afraid to die alone, of course I turned back.

How much time did it take for you to create those videos, one arriving each day, her looking progressively worse? The worst was that one video with her by the window in her study, Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance. It came on the third day. The sunlight that glinted through her silver hair, like icy filaments, made her look so painfully beautiful, yet it was not enough to erase the shadows beneath her eyes or the sadness in them.

A better question, I suppose, is “Why?” Why resort to that when you know how much Mother means to me, especially now that Father is gone? Are you still jealous of our closeness? Do you still believe she loved me most?

Not that you deserve to be, but I’ll let you in on a secret. I used to believe Mother loved me more than you as well. One day, I must’ve been about twelve, in my pathetic need to always be reminded that I was loved and cherished, I asked her why she loved me more than you. I waited a few moments, as she looked skyward, it seemed, for the answer. I was sure she’d say it was because I was more beautiful, more kind, smarter, that I had a more generous spirit, because truth be told, these things are true. But she didn’t say that. Mother told me that she did not love me most. Nor did she love you more than me.

Then why do you spend so much more time with me than Anita? Why do you kiss me goodnight and not her? I numbered all the things she did for me and not you. Do you know what she said?

Because you need me more than Anita.

In her way, which was always kind yet honest, Mother was telling me that you were the stronger of the two of us. But now, I wonder. Would a strong person use her sister’s weaknesses against her just to win? This was a low blow, Anita.

By now you’re probably wondering how I eventually figured out that the videos from Mother were merely a cruel ploy to get me to go back home without a fight. It was the video from Day Eight.

Mother lay in bed, slight as a sliver of grass. When her image popped up on the view screen my heart felt like it was trapped in a vice. She reached out. A tear traveled from the corner of her eye toward the pillow. She coughed, then called out my name. Her voice was so soft, so small and weak.

“Please hurry home, Ziza,” she said. “I don’t want to die without laying eyes on my favorite girl at least one more time.”

Favorite girl? No, Anita. Our mother never would have said that.

You think you’re so smart. You think you know everything. Yet, you don’t know kindness or humility. You don’t even know your own mother.

The decision to dedicate your entire life to science was an error. Life is so much more than entropy, polymerisation, and endothermic reactions. You really can have your coffee and the cream too. You should have married Asante. He would have humanized you. He would have taught you to slow down and enjoy the precious little moments, that together they all add up to a great big life full of disappointments, yes, but also joy and love and mystery. He would have saved you from yourself and cold loneliness.

This is where I remind you that you know nothing about programming that I didn’t teach you. Anita Enterprises is the mega-conglomerate it is because of me, your older sister and mentor. If I wanted to shut down every system on your ship, including life support, I could. And believe me, after this latest stunt of yours, I’ve been giving that idea serious consideration. The fact that I haven’t sent a couple of torpedoes your way is a testament to my love for our mother. She’d be angry if I killed you. So, I won’t.

See you on Mars.

Ziza

P.S. Don’t start none, won’t be none.

P.P.S. Bobo and Cow are very displeased with you.

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2161-01-01

Ziza,

It’s been weeks since I last wrote, but you haven’t been far from my thoughts. Far from it.

While I continue toward the planet, I’ve been passing the time on my escape pod making a list of all the reasons I hate you, numbered and ordered least to greatest. It’s a long long list, forever incomplete. A sister’s hate is like the heat death of the universe: infinitely expanding, eternal, the last flame burning in this cold, barren desolation where God abandoned us.

Reason #1,565: I hate the way you eat popcorn with chopsticks to keep your hands clean. Are you too good even for butter smudges?

Reason #480: I hate how you laugh at bad jokes. Puns aren’t actually funny, Ziza. Everyone outgrew “why did the chicken cross the road” after elementary school.

Reason #111: Blue eye shadow. Self-explanatory.

Reason #38: “Don’t start none, won’t be none.” Really? Better knock that shit off. Like you’re not an adult responsible for her own actions.

Reason #16: I hate how Mother named you after herself, like you were the pinnacle of all her hopes, while I was named to placate our pushy grandmother.

Reason #15: I hate how you always laugh at me.

Reason #10: I hate how your favorite animal is the raccoon. You only picked it because it’s endangered. You can’t resist a lost cause, even if you don’t actually want to do anything useful about it.

Reason #9: Seriously, blue eye shadow.

Reason #4: That last family dinner we had before Father died, when we took the shuttle out to the Moon to picnic on Mons Agnes while we watched the Perseid meteor shower dancing bright upon Earth’s atmosphere like the footsteps of angels. Mother brought her heirloom silver for the occasion; I think we all knew in our hearts it was a special trip. We’d agreed for Father’s sake to get along, just for a few hours. He hated how we fought, how we picked at each other like children picking old scabs that won’t heal. Do you remember the white curling through his black hair? His cheeks sunk deep by the chemo? He wanted to dish up the jasmine rice and flatbread himself. His hands trembled so badly the peas rolled onto Mother’s quilt beneath the picnic pop-up, just skirting the regolith.

We both know I wanted to talk with him about the inheritance. I just wanted my share, my 50/50 split, but Mother was so concerned about poor helpless Ziza, who had run into such tough times after college, chasing after pretty men and idealistic wide-eyed save-the-raccoons causes that she needed a larger cut to keep up her lifestyle. Anita Enterprises cost me everything while all you ever did was chase your girlhood dreams of love and happy endings.

We were having such a great time. Your useless pet raccoons were recharging their solar batteries in your lap. Father told us stories of his childhood, how they didn’t even have a family shuttle when he grew up, and you could only sleep rough in wild places like Antarctica’s rocky plains. Mother held his hand and kissed him, love shining in her eyes. No matter how sick he got, he was still the dark-skinned 17-year-old godling she’d met on the road to Mount Kilimanjaro in their youth. We even tolerated a few of your puns.

It would not last. I volunteered to scrape the leftovers into the recycler at the service booth down the path. It was so close, I didn’t bother to bring a communication device. You deny it, but we both know you followed me. You used the Moon’s lower gravity to pile those rocks against the door while I did my chores inside. When I tried to leave, the door wouldn’t budge. I could only watch my family from the viewing port, my mother and sister and dying father laughing together, though I couldn’t hear them. I screamed and pounded the window, but nobody noticed from the picnic pop-up. No one could hear me through the vacuum of space.

How can I ever forgive you that prank, those precious minutes of our father’s health ticking away, and me unable to be there? How can I forgive that lost opportunity, those memories that should have been mine to cherish, to bear me up when I wake at night so desperate to feel his whiskered kiss on my forehead, his voice telling me he’s so proud of me, proud of everything I’ve done?

This is why I hate you, Ziza. This is why I can never stop hating you.

Reason #2: Those diamond drills in your robot raccoons weren’t just drills. That cornbread pan wasn’t just a pan. You know what, Ziza? In spite of everything else, I only sent you back to Earth with those fake videos to protect you from yourself, and keep you out of harm’s way. Because despite this whole list, part of me still loved you, stupid as it sounds. Maybe it’s because you’re named for Mother. But you tried to dump me into the vacuum of space, Sister Dearest. You tried to murder me in my sleep. You activated the wafer computer in the pan’s false bottom, hacked my defenses, and the drills turned my hull into cheese by the time I woke up. If I hadn’t mounted the terraforming nuke to the escape pod… but I did.

Reason #1: Did you ever love me? Ever, Ziza? I’m not filling this one out yet, because I don’t think I’ve yet hated you as much as a woman can hate her sister. Not yet. But I will.

So I’m going to tell you something else you don’t yet know: On the wreck of my shuttle, scraping by on the last of my life support, are a dozen rare raccoon specimens. I was going to release them on Mars after the terraforming ended so they could colonize a safe place far from any predators. My shuttle is set to self-destruct in two days’ time. If you leave your current course, you might just have time to save them. Let’s find out what you care more about: helpless garbatrites, or near-extinct raccoons.

The shuttle also contains an urn with Father’s ashes, wrapped in extra scarves in the top hatch in my quarters. Mother asked me to scatter them on the planet because Father had so many happy memories of camping there with his daughters. I didn’t have time to rescue it when I had to abandon ship a few days ago.

I don’t have that one on my list yet. Better go add it now.

Hate you always,

Anita

P.S. Why did Ziza fly across the solar system twice? Because she was a double crosser. Get it?

P.P.S. Happy New Year, by the way.

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2161/01/02

Anita,

By now you’ve probably realized that regardless of your efforts, your escape pod’s trajectory is no longer Mars. You are now on an intercept path with me. I know that you must be seething, cursing my name, praying for my damnation (you’ve always been so dramatic), but give me the opportunity to explain.

Your ship was never in danger. The plan was that once you entered in new coordinates to anyplace other than Mars, preferably home, the diamond drills would have set about repairing the holes they’d created in the hull of your ship. Genius ancillary programming, if I do say so myself. All you had to do was turn around. But you, with your flare for the dramatic and unwillingness to give up, even when you know you’ve lost, decided to jump ship and make the rest of the voyage via the escape pod.

The escape pod. The escape pod with only half the power you’ll need to complete the trip to Mars. At the rate you’re going you’ll be one hundred and three before you even break orbit. If you paid as much attention to the details as you do the drama, you might have remembered that.

Why couldn’t all your hot hate keep those poor raccoons warm as your abandoned ship plunges onward toward the cold outer depths of space, too long and too far for either of us to go? I won’t be able to save those raccoons, nor Father’s ashes, because I will be saving you.

You can thank me later.

Your last message, so thick with evil enmity for your only sibling in the galaxy, reminded me of Tariq, the only man I ever considered staying with for a lifetime. I’ve tried over the last forty-three years, without an iota of success, to tangle and finally lose my memory of him among the many others. He was brighter than Sirius and sweeter than lugduname, at least to me. I know that long-legged bird wasn’t perfect, he chewed with his mouth open and, truth be told, he wasn’t very bright but he loved me without reserve.

You didn’t like him at first. You called him a “pretty, useless thing”, because he didn’t have the same knack for business or driving ambition for more, that you did. He was an artist and liked to create beautiful things, to experience the delights of life with all of his senses exposed and ready.

It was through your senses that he finally won you over. So thoughtful was he, that knowing your dislike for him, he still surprised you with your favorite, hot homemade waffles, on your birthday.

When I broke off the engagement with him only a week later, you, who had hated him all along, refused to speak to me for months. You said I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. You called me a fool.

I never told you why I broke off the engagement. And I bet you never knew that even now, there are sleep cycles when instead of sleep, I lay awake imaging how happy I’d be today had I not broken poor Tariq’s heart.

I broke off our engagement because of your Reason #1. In answer to your question, I love you more than breath itself, baby sister.

Tariq said to me one day, as we lay beneath the sun in a field of cool holo-grass, “Any sister who would waste her dying father’s final hours arguing over an inheritance is surely too selfish to bear.” He took my foot in his hands and kneaded my heel expertly. “I’m willing to tolerate Anita, my love, because of you.”

I said nothing to this for a while, mostly because the foot massage was so exquisite that it stole my breath and crossed my eyes. But when he was done, I politely slipped on my shoes, clapped off the holo-vision, and asked him to leave.

“If you love me, you must love my sister too. Anything less is unacceptable,” I told him.

So you see, silly sister, you can hate me a million times, but no matter what, I’ll still love you, even though you don’t deserve it. God, you’re such a brat.

Ziza

P.S. Are you seriously pouting about your name? Mother should have named you Shakespeare because you’re nothing but drama.

P.P.S. I didn’t pile those rocks against the door. That was Bobo and Cow. They were just trying to play hide and seek with you. I guess my sweet raccoonie-woonies won that round.

P.P.P.S. Why did the raccoon cross the solar system? To keep her sister’s paw off Mars.

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2161-01-11

Dear Ziza,

Greetings from Mars.

Don’t worry. Nothing has changed. I have regretfully failed to deploy the terraforming nuke. My mission has failed, for now.

Perhaps even before you read this message, GalactiPol will be taking you into custody. I called them when my escape pod veered off course, when the navigation stopped responding to my counter-hacks. You might have forgotten in your rashness that the Mumbai Council for Martian Development endorsed my plan for terraforming, and that I was their agent. Interfering with my mission meant meddling with the Coalition of Humankind itself.

I didn’t call GalactiPol sooner because I wanted to beat you at your own game. So few people in this huge, empty universe can even approach my creativity and intellect. You’ve always pushed me to the greatest apex of my brilliance. I’m never as inventive as when you’re scheming to ruin me. But the thought of losing Father’s ashes into the void of space… well, it gave me no rest. He doesn’t deserve that, not at our hands. I’d hoped you’d fetch the urn, but instead I’m calling an end to our battle of wits.

GalactiPol scooped up my escape pod and listened to my account of your wrongdoings. They have dispatched a salvage vessel to my wreck, and an armed cruiser to arrest you. Unfortunately, I made a fatal mistake: the raccoons. As you well know, I did not have authorization to remove these endangered creatures from Earth.

So they’ve arrested me too. I’ve been dropped on Mars for safekeeping while they run the raccoons back to Earth. They’ve dispatched another cruiser to your coordinates. Soon they will bring you here too, dear Ziza, and for the second time we’ll wander the sands together in this desert of red storms, with only wit and curiosity and mutual hatred to keep us alive until someone returns for us.

Did you know part of our old camp is still here? Somehow the shell of our mobile lab held up against the years. Probably because of the garbatrites. Remember we’d left the lab tucked in the shadow of their great stone. Apparently they liked it (perhaps for the way it holds warmth during the cold Martian nights) because they covered it in their tiny homes like a shipwreck bejeweled with coral and barnacles. When I turn on the lights at night, they dance along the seams in swirling shapes, carving microscopic paths through the dust coating, just as frail human biceps have pushed and moved the world until you can see their efforts from space. The Great Wall of China! The glittering glass megascrapers of Nigeria! How floating Melbourne glistens like a blue jewel in the dark, riding the waves forever, its flooded gondola channels sipping the ocean’s rise and fall! Our little lab is a world for these tiny creatures. They shout, We are here. We exist.

But let’s talk about Tariq. Now there’s an unhealed wound running to our cores. It’s true, Ziza, that you were always the prettiest. I am a plain woman, an experience you can never understand. Your beauty is a passport into people’s best nature. Everyone sees in you the face of an angel, and they give you an angel’s due. Well, any plain woman knows the converse is true, that we have to prove again and again our worth and goodness to a world that mistakes the grotesque for evil, the ungroomed for lazy, the fat for stupid.

Your Tariq, like all pretty men, suffered from the same assumptions. He was never as good to anyone as he was to you, Ziza Angel-faced. When he didn’t ignore me outright, he liked to pick on me for your amusement. He named me Yam Nose and Ogre Teeth, and when I protested, he laughed me off as too sensitive, as if I didn’t have a right to my dignity. People like him are cruel to girls like me in a thoughtless, automatic way, like they can’t imagine us having feelings any more complex than a dog’s. Yes, I detested him. But the day he made me waffles, throwing me one small, quiet kindness, I realized how happy he made you, that you intended to marry him. He’d be around our family a long, long time. I made my peace.

I am sorry you realized so late the flaw in him that was obvious to me from the first. But know, Ziza, that Tariq must accept responsibility for his own character. If you had married him, when you aged and your beauty began to fade, he surely would’ve turned that same cruelty on you. He may very well have been your soulmate, but take a hard look at your own soul, and ask whether you too mistake your angelic face for more than it is. You are merely human.

So come to Mars, Sister. Come to where this all started that summer our father wanted us to bond, back before we hated the taste of water, before we learned to despise each other in small ways and big. We cannot escape one another. Our hatred has been our brilliance, our secret genius, the harsh red desert that pushed and pinched and goaded us to build towers you can see from the Moon. Imagine what a lifetime of love might have accomplished

Come to Mars, Ziza. Scatter our father’s ashes with me. If we cannot make this place bloom with life, at least we can make it a little more dusty.

Anita

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2161-01-11

Dearest Anita,

I can see the GalactiPol cruiser from my starboard viewport. Its black and gold stripes practically glow beneath the strobing orange beacon and make it look like a psychedelic bumblebee. Most people in my situation, facing detainment on Mars, endless expensive legal proceedings, possible time in prison, would be locked in the grips of fear and worry. Perhaps even shame. But not me. The one thought stuck in my mind, like a diptera fastened to sticky paper, is how beautiful that cruiser is and how excited I am to begin this second adventure.

It’s all about perception.

During that last picnic on the moon, when you were locked in the service booth, Father talked about perception. “Perception is everything. If you can project what you perceive it will become reality. You will believe it. More importantly, whether good or bad, everyone else will believe in your reality as well, and they will believe in you.” Not until I read your last letter did I realize how right Father was. And how wrong we have been.

In the mirror I’ve always seen the imperfect likeness of our mother, not quite as beautiful, not quite as kind, and with but a fraction of her intelligence. I have our father’s height and amber-flecked brown eyes, but none of his grace, strength, or athleticism. Yet, somehow you see in me the face of an angel.

In you I see the sharp mind and steady hands of a scientist. A fearless tenacious spirit intent on exploring all possibilities even at great cost, able to articulate your ideas, to change hearts and minds. You have boundless strength, so much so that you have been the central support for Mother and me since Father’s death. There is nothing plain about you, little sister, nothing wanting.

How is it that our perceptions have never aligned?

Be right back. GalactiPol is hailing me…

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2161-01-12

Sorry it has taken me so long to return to this letter, but I had a few calls to make. Officers Gavalia and Ambrose boarded my ship at 2315 and took me into custody. My detainment cell is surprisingly modish, with full amenities including a computer and personal uncensored communication device. I have even been given unrestricted access to their onboard digital library.

According to officer Gavalia, though entry into GalactiPol requires extensive training and a stringent vetting system, they have little opportunity to actually do the type of policing their organization exists to perform. I suppose there just aren’t that many galactic criminals to catch these days, besides you and me, that is.

Now where was I? Ah yes. Perceptions.

I’ve been mesmerized by the images you sent of the garbatrite homes, the bright multilayered encrusted structures in every shade of red, orange and pink, lambent lights beneath the gaze of the sun. They expound beauty and ingenuity and life and more than anything, a prescience greater than anything either of us could have conceived.

We’ve been darting back and forth through this solar system, in an effort to outdo one another, trying our damndest to affect the change of our choosing, thinking we are so smart and so in control, when in truth, we are no greater than those garbatrites, and perhaps we are even less wise than they.

Perhaps there is a way for us both to have what we wanted, to terraform Mars and to protect the garbatrites. They were always keen to share their world with us and seeing the ingenuity and beauty of their structures, perhaps we can convince them to help us transform the barren surface of Mars into one of cooperative beauty. We can provide the framework for our cities and homes, and they can build upon them, layering their coral-like exoteric structures, creating homes befitting us all, unlike anything in the entire solar system.

I called Tariq shortly after my detainment aboard the GalactiPol cruiser. Before you think me hopeless, let me explain. Besides being happily ensconced in a polyamorous relationship with two of the nicest men and woman I have ever met, he has long since given up on his art (he was never very good anyway) and has been the Chief GalactiPol Officer for several years. I was hoping that there was still enough lingering affection between us that he would agree to assist me in this difficult situation.

Unfortunately, he is unable, as I had hoped, to have the charges against us repealed, but we have been allowed to serve the entirety of our sentence on Mars. Together.

Shall we do this, sister? Shall we make our dreams come true?

I envision us making a home from our old pod quarters. Perhaps we can build on an extra room and invite Mother. We can even build a special corral for Bobo and Cow, where they can play happily and where they won’t be able to disturb you as you work on your next great experiment. With the help of the garbatrites we can build a greenhouse. We’ll grow corn and tomatoes in soil fertilized with the ashes of our father. We will create a real home, a life. And we will relearn one another, our strengths and weakness, our mutual love for each other. One day other Earthers will join us on our red planet and find a world of wonder encased in garbatrite domes. A home.

Can you see it, sister? Good. Now hold that thought in your mind until we are reunited.

With all my love,

Ziza

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2161-01-13

Dear Ziza,

Why did the sisters cross the solar system? To get to the other’s side.

See you soon,

Anita

Author’s Note (Khaalidah): When I met Rachael about three years ago, I experienced an instant and sincere affection for her. We toyed with the idea of a collaboration for awhile before we finally dove in. We didn’t outline this story beforehand and had no clear idea where it would go. It took us across the galaxy, with great food, adventure, and lots of laughter. Collaborating with someone as talented and easy-going as Rachael was a joy for me. She charged my imagination. I am pleased to be able to share the results with everyone else. In many ways the end result reflects how I feel about Rachael. She is a sister in my heart and a dear friend.

Author’s Note (Rachael): Khaalidah is my dear friend, my comrade-in-arms, probably a time traveler, and everything I want to be when I grow up. So when we started kicking around the idea of doing a collaboration, I jumped on the opportunity. Writing this story with her was immensely fun, often hilarious, and always surprising. While working on “Regarding the Robot Raccoons,” we eventually realized that although we each controlled a single character’s voice, we were actually writing each other’s characters via our reactions to one another, creating a more complex and nuanced view of Anita and Ziza that you get through just one perspective. I think this phenomenon also exists in all good friendships: in seeing yourself reflected through another’s eyes, you’re inspired to push harder, reach higher, and go farther in life than you ever would on your own. Khaalidah’s friendship makes me a better person, just as collaborating with her makes me a better writer. I hope our readers, in turn, will enjoy the results.

Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Athens, Georgia. Contrary to the rumors, she is probably not a secret android. Rachael’s fiction has appeared in dozens of venues, including Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and PodCastle. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming, and gardening. She has written one novel entitled An Unproductive Woman available on Amazon. She has also been published at Escape Pod , Strange Horizons, and Fiyah!. Khaalidah is also co-editor at Podcastle.org where she is on a mission to encourage more women to submit fantasy stories. Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality.

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

DP Fiction #28A: “The Existentialist Men” by Gwendolyn Clare

Kris has a talent for making toast come out perfectly every time. Never burnt. The rest of us yearn for a superpower so practical.

Ryan has incredible parking-space karma, but only after he has already parked. He’ll circle round and round the block, finding nothing and more nothing, and eventually give up and take that one empty space six blocks away. He’ll bundle up against the cold, scarf wrapped all the way up to his chin and hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, and walk the six blocks to the restaurant. And without fail, just as he opens the door, a parking space will open up directly in front. Once, he ran back to his car to move it closer, but the empty space had been claimed by the time he drove there. The parking spaces are taunting him.

Technology always behaves itself in the presence of Candace. If someone has a computer problem, all she has to do to fix it is walk over and glance at the screen. Of course, as soon as she walks away, the computer begins malfunctioning again. She doesn’t understand what the rest of us are always complaining about.

Julie could disappear, but only once. We all miss Julie.

Hiro is never, ever, in a situation where he might have the opportunity to be a hero. One day he slept in, and that was the day someone lost control of their car on the ice and plowed through the glass front of the café where he usually got his morning coffee. When the flu prevented him from going holiday shopping downtown, a chunk of limestone façade spontaneously fell off a building onto a crowded sidewalk, killing one person and injuring six. If he declines to join us for lunch, invariably someone in the restaurant will nearly choke to death. The rest of us got trained to do the Heimlich, and we try to take him along with us whenever we can, like a shield against the bad luck that seems to cluster in his absence. Hiro, for his own part, tries to stick to his schedule so he’s never not somewhere he’s supposed to be.

Brianna gets improbable injuries. It’s true that she enjoys her share of dangerous activities—rugby, skiing, roller derby—but that’s never when she gets hurt. She sprained her wrist in her sleep. She broke a bone in her foot getting out of the desk chair in her home office. Once, she actually slipped on a banana peel and broke her elbow. At an improv comedy show, she laughed so hard she cracked a rib. Most of the ER nurses know her by name. She has to be especially careful when Hiro’s not around.

Nick always knows exactly what time it is without looking at a clock. This would have been incredibly useful back in the 18th Century. But we all own watches and cell phones, and don’t really need him for anything.

Carlos says he has consistent, reliable precognitive abilities. Unfortunately, his precognition only senses one or two seconds ahead, so he never manages to react in time to change the outcome. This means no one else can really confirm whether or not he has a superpower at all, but we choose to believe him anyway. With everything else we’ve seen, why not? At least he knows what’s coming.

My superpower is that I’m friends with all these people, and nothing extraordinary ever happens to me.

Gwendolyn Clare’s debut novel — INK, IRON, AND GLASS — is the first in a YA steampunk duology forthcoming from Macmillan/Imprint in 2018. Her short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. She holds a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, a PhD in Mycology, and swears she’s done collecting acronyms. She lives in North Carolina with too many cats, too many ducks, and never enough books.

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

DP Fiction #27B: “The Aunties Return the Ocean” by Chris Kuriata

Content note(click for details)

Content note: harm to children

Auntie Roberta landed badly on the roof of her escarpment house, scraping her knees across the flagstone shingles and splitting her pantyhose. Her arms were too full of black water to keep her balance so she nearly slid off the edge.

She carried so much ocean she barely knew where to hide it all. Inside her stony home, she filled the kitchen drawers and cupboards with cold dark brine. Every pot and tankard as well. She quickly ran out of places, yet her weary arms were still loaded with the stuff. Where would it all fit? Auntie Roberta got on her knees and stuffed the final bits of ocean into the mouse holes. She heard the panicked mice squeak before drowning.

What an exhausting evening she’d endured. At the appointed hour, all the Aunties of the world had banded together like a swarm of locusts, and set upon the heart of the ocean. Their grubby hands tore the water apart, breaking up the reflection of the moon as they scrambled to load every last drop into their arms. All along the empty ocean floor, fish flopped and ships jammed into rock beds. The neighbours had called the Aunties’ bluff, refusing to give in to their demands. So, just as the Aunties threatened, they stole the ocean.

During the theft, Auntie Roberta kept close watch on the other Aunties, noticing none of her sisters carried away as much ocean as she did. Auntie Roberta always did more than her fair share and never received thanks. The other Aunties thought they were smarter than her, but really they were just lazier.

“Hey!” Auntie Robert shouted. “Get away from there!”

A burr covered cat with collapsed ears sat on the kitchen table, lapping away at a mug filled with ocean. Auntie Roberta flung a wooden spoon and sent the cat retreating through a gnawed hole in the parlour wall.

“Sneaky thief,” she huffed.

***

“It smells damp in here,” the neighbour woman Marilyn said. She didn’t outright accuse Auntie Roberta of helping to steal the ocean, but she certainly sounded suspicious.

Normally, Auntie Roberta threw rocks at nosey neighbours, but the neighbour woman Marilyn came bearing a freshly baked pie and, well, Auntie Roberta didn’t know any spells strong enough to compete with flawlessly executed baking.

“Roof leaks when it rains,” Auntie Roberta said, stuffing pie into her mouth with both hands. “Makes the house damp. Can’t do nothing about it.”

The neighbour woman Marilyn pointed to the ceramic mugs, each filled to the brim with a curious liquid the colour of midnight. “What’s in all these?”

“Coffee what’s gone off.”

The neighbour woman Marilyn put her nose to the rim and breathed in the scent of salt and seaweed, triggering memories of her uncle’s tugboat and the baskets of crabs she helped haul from the deep.

Auntie Roberta licked the last of the crumbs from the bottom of the pie pan and the neighbour woman took her cue to leave. A neighbour had nothing to fear in the house of an Auntie so long as she was eating, but once an Auntie’s belly was full, staying under their roof was like leaving your head in a lion’s mouth–sooner or later the jaw would get tired and CHOMP.

Auntie Roberta washed her sticky lips in a mug of the ocean, breaking up the reflection of the midnight moon that continued to shine from the still water.

***

Word of their victory reached Auntie Roberta in her rain barrel: “The neighbours have agreed to our demands. Therefore, return your section of the ocean back where it belongs.”

Auntie Roberta took stock of the ocean squirreled away all over her house and wondered how on earth she’d manage to carry so much. She couldn’t believe she had done it the first time.

“Looks like I’m making two trips,” she grumbled.

To distract her mind from the inconvenient task, she looked forward to the coming spring. At last, no more sneaking around or disguising her identity. No more inventing schemes to trick the offspring into entering her service. Thanks to the ocean theft, this year the Aunties could snatch up whatever offspring they desired and the neighbours couldn’t lift a finger in protest. It had been agreed.

***

The sight of the returned ocean astonished Auntie Roberta.

“Are we joking?”

The returned ocean sat miles below its original level. The water had gone off, turning grey as stale root-brew. Auntie Roberta saw all sorts of detritus swirling in the stunted ocean; cobwebs, bits of crayon, pocket lint, silky upper-lip hair… You couldn’t even see the reflection of the moon anymore. It was an embarrassment. The Aunties left the ocean looking torn apart as a robbed grave.

The original genius of their plan, having every Auntie take part (for how could the neighbours track down and punish a million Aunties?) turned out to be its greatest weakness, for while a dozen Aunties will be cunning and precise, two dozen will be absent-minded and deceitful. Harvesting the effort of every Auntie in the world? Good Lord. The neighbours ought to be thankful there was any ocean left.

***

The day after, Auntie Roberta lay on her roof, camouflaged beneath a blanket of shingles, her arms loaded with rocks to repel the invading neighbours she was sure were coming once they switched on the morning news and got a look at the mess the Aunties had made of their beloved ocean.

Not a single rock needed to be thrown. The angry neighbours never came. Instead of seeking retribution, the neighbours gathered together as a community and held a day of mourning for their once vital ocean.

No action would be taken against the Aunties. The neighbours would honour their agreement, terrified if they reneged the Aunties would rise up and do something even worse.

That evening, Auntie Roberta smelled fresh bran muffins and opened the door on the neighbour woman Marilyn. Auntie Roberta stuffed muffins into her mouth, famished after spending all day on the roof with nothing to eat but the occasional low flying sparrow.

The neighbour woman Marilyn lifted a mug from the kitchen table. A bit of the ocean remained inside: a mouthful’s worth. The neighbour woman Marilyn swirled the mug, making the ocean race around the ceramic walls like a fat, black worm.

“I’d never looked closely before at how beautiful it was,” she said.

Auntie Roberta kept quiet, unwilling to admit her involvement in the ocean fiasco.

The ocean in the mug retained its midnight colour, and when allowed to pool the reflection of the moon shone brightly, dancing on the wall like candle flame.

“May I keep this?” the neighbour woman Marilyn asked. “So that one day my grandchildren can see what the ocean used to look like?”

Auntie Roberta’s full belly made her agreeable, and she waved her hand generously. “I suppose so, on the condition of future baking.”

She watched the neighbour woman Marilyn carry the mug down the escarpment, clutching it between her hands, not wanting to spill a precious drop of the original ocean. Neighbours made a bad habit of deifying things. Such reverence for objects made them easy to take advantage of.

***

When an Auntie grabbed an offspring, they performed a series of alterations to make the offspring more compatible with their needs. Some were muted. Others had their limbs lengthened or shortened. A few had their eyes cut out in order to heighten their other senses.

Auntie Roberta modified her offspring by burning the hair down to stubble, compacting the feet into cloven hooves, and replacing the teeth with chunks of rock. This kept the neighbours from recognizing their darlings when Auntie Roberta sent them into town to purchase necessities. She didn’t mind the extra work. She re-sculpted the offspring so effectively that even if their mothers did recognize them, their mothers always let them go, correctly believing they were beyond hope.

For days, Auntie Roberta waited in vain for fresh baking. Because of the damage done to the ocean, the temperature soared and there was scarcely air to breathe. Few neighbours could make the trip up the escarpment. There were no more markets and all the stores were closed. The moon did its best to keep the tidal waves in effect, but the new handicapped ocean could no longer provide the neighbours with the luxuries they had taken for granted all these millennia.

Before the receiver in her radio went out, Auntie Roberta heard about the neighbours’ pitiful attempt to rehabilitate the ocean. They emptied the tank of every aquarium and science lab. They hoped these fish would adapt to the new environment. “Nature will find a way” was the motto. Over the next thousand years, the fish might evolve into new species–guppies the size of whales–that would clean the waters and make the ocean once again capable of reflecting the moon. No neighbour alive would live to see that day, but maybe the children of their grandchildrens’ children would know the ocean as their ancestors once had.

Auntie Roberta allowed none of this tumult to affect her. So long as her house remained protected and she had her latest offspring to aid her daily tasks, she could endure anything.

The other Aunties, however, decided the neighbours had suffered long enough, and so they began bartering back the other half of the ocean.

***

Auntie Balut came to visit, trekking up the escarpment on the back of her long-legged offspring. The sunburned beast of burden collapsed after delivering her master. Auntie Roberta found an old can of stewed tomatoes. She cracked the tin and slowly fed the convulsing offspring the life-giving water inside. The last thing Auntie Roberta wanted was for the offspring to croak. With no one to carry her down the escarpment, lazy Auntie Balut would declare herself a houseguest and expect to be waited on hand and foot. The trouble with Aunties was their obnoxious insistence on making themselves at home.

With her shoes off and her bare feet propped on the kitchen table, Auntie Balut showed off the fine jewelry swaddled six layers thick around her neck. “This here had been in the family seven generations. And this here? They actually had to break into the mausoleum to strip it off the body.”

All the Aunties were rolling in wealth, for each held back a parcel of the ocean, stowed away in a kitchen drawer or under the bed like an antique vase they were waiting to appreciate.

“I could ask for all ten of their fingers, and they’d happily slice ‘em off with one hand and then wedge the knife between their teeth to slice ‘em off the other.” Auntie Balut dumped a purse of chopped fingers onto the table to prove she spoke no hyperbole.

In these harsh times, a bucket of the original ocean went a long way, and so the Aunties made out like bandits. The neighbours learned to extract threads of algae and encourage new growth. They pulled tiny fish from the black depths, happy to see new schools spawned the next morning.

Most impressive of all, when the sun set and the neighbours’ pitiful hovels were cast in darkness, their bucket of original ocean reflected the bright full moon just as it had shined the night the ocean was stolen. Whole families from age eight to eighty circled the bucket, hypnotized by the twinkling light and fortified by the fresh air.

When Auntie Balut finished crowing about her recent windfall, she looked around Auntie Roberta’s kitchen and her mood turned dour. Auntie Roberta had no mounds of jewels or ancestral skulls or even piles of snipped-off fingers to attest to profitable negotiations for her share of the ocean.

“Oh sweetie,” Auntie Balut said. “Did it not occur to you to keep a bit of the ocean for yourself? You know, to make a little—” she rubbed her fingers together in the sign of filthy lucre. Auntie Balut threw her head back and cackled till she broke wind, relishing the embarrassed look on Auntie Roberta’s face.

“You put all your ocean back? What, was someone supposed to spell out what we were really up to?”

Auntie Roberta held her chin high, waiting for Auntie Balut to laugh herself out. Instead, the laughter and the insults intensified, turned mean. “Maybe you gave the neighbours ocean freely. Maybe you love them more than your own Aunties.”

When she’d had enough, Auntie Roberta retrieved her knife from beside the whetstone and went outside. On the lawn, Auntie Balut’s offspring slept heavily, full of tomato water and dreaming of its old life. Auntie Roberta swung her knife, ripping the throat open from ear to ear, effectively bringing the offspring’s service to an early retirement.

“Leave all your jewelry on the table,” Auntie Roberta said as she wiped her bloody hands on her apron. “That should lighten you up enough to carry your own fat ass down the escarpment.”

***

Ages had passed since Auntie Roberta last paid someone a visit, so she intended to do this one right. Instead of squeezing herself into a ball to roll down the chimney or gnawing her way through the tasty kitchen floorboard, Auntie Roberta clicked her heels together on the front porch’s WELCOME mat in a perfect parody of one of the neighbours. She even brought a gift.

“Good morning,” Auntie Roberta said, proudly displaying a tray of baking. She hadn’t the right ingredients for her cookies; mostly sand and flour made from crushed mice bones, held together with spit and tomato water. She decorated the tops with broken Christmas lights.

The neighbour woman Marilyn nodded, and ushered Auntie Roberta inside. She had shorn her head bald, and her dry skin wrinkled like an impression of an alligator.

“Is your husband at work?” Auntie Roberta asked.

“No,” the neighbour woman Marilyn said, casting her eyes to the bloodstained hole blasted into the wall over the couch.

“Too lazy, is he?”

The neighbour woman showed no interest in the cookies, so Auntie Roberta snatched a couple and tossed them into her mouth. The glass crunched and made colourful clumps between her teeth.

She cut to the chase. “Have you still got it?”

The neighbour woman Marilyn nodded. “Have you come to take that from me too?”

Auntie Roberta reached for more cookies. “Things freely given cannot be taken back. But there’s nothing to stop us from making a trade.”

“What could you possibly have to trade me?”

The last of the cookies flew into Auntie Roberta’s mouth. “Anything you’d like, so long as you’re not too greedy.”

“Too greedy?”

“Meaning ask for one thing, not a dozen.”

She licked the empty tray and tossed it into the corner. The ceramic shattered, sending white shards flying like punched out teeth.

The neighbour woman Marilyn closed her eyes. Praying? Thinking? After a moment of privacy, she nodded and said, “Come with me.”

Stuffed animals made a pyramid on the too-tiny bed. Auntie Roberta’s back ached to see a bed that small. She would have to saw her legs off to fit, and there would be no room for the occasional late night company. The heads of plastic dolls crunched beneath her feet. This was a gaudy, immature room.

The neighbour woman Marilyn reached beneath the bed, retrieving a lunchbox painted over with frolicking cartoon animals. The frivolous object offended Auntie Roberta’s sensibilities, but the neighbour woman handled it reverentially, as though it were part of a daily religious ritual.

She split the box open and removed the Thermos rattling inside. Before passing the pink canister to Auntie Roberta, she held it to her chest, resting the lid against her cheek. Auntie Roberta thought she looked ridiculous, like a chimpanzee fooled into accepting a surrogate dolly.

“At night, I’d unscrew the lid, and moon light would cover the ceiling. We used to lie on our backs and watch the light ripple. She said it looked like friendly ghosts.” The memory pained her, and she thrust the Thermos towards Auntie Roberta. “It sings to me at night, begging to be let out, but I’m afraid it will evaporate and I’ll be left with nothing.”

“Relax, I’ve handled ocean before.”

At the front door, with the Thermos tucked snugly into her apron, Auntie Roberta lingered, about to suggest the neighbour woman continue to visit her little house on top of the escarpment. She could bring fresh bread, baked on the rocks in her yard. Neighbours often made feeble attempts to befriend Aunties, either out of awe or fear, but such partnerships were forbidden. This was a new world, however, and Auntie Roberta didn’t feel like she needed to play by the rules anymore.

She turned back, about to extend an invitation, but changed her mind. The light in the neighbour woman’s eyes, dim when she first arrived, had now gone out completely. She was a woman without hope, and Auntie Roberta knew she would never see her again.

***

Using steady, freshly licked fingers, Auntie Roberta poured the ocean into a hollow glass amulet the shape of a spider with its legs ripped off. She sealed the amulet tight and hung the chain over her neck. Ice coldness stabbed her breast and she shrieked. Unexpectedly, the ocean remained as cold as it had been the night the Aunties scooped the water up.

“You’re a tenacious bugger,” she saluted the ocean.

The heavy amulet swung from her chest proudly. No Auntie could laugh at her now, like stupid Auntie Balut had done. The ocean around her neck proved she was just as devious and cunning as the lot of them. She couldn’t be mocked—just so long as the embarrassing truth of her giving the ocean away to a neighbour woman (and having to pathetically make a deal for it back) stayed secret.

“I didn’t trade mine away for useless trinkets. I still got my piece of the ocean.”

All that was left now was for Auntie Roberta to fulfill her end of the trade between her and the neighbour woman.

“It’s a goddamn shame,” Auntie Roberta said.

The offspring stirred at the sound of her approaching footsteps. For practical purposes, Auntie Roberta kept the offspring crated beneath the basement steps when she went out. So much easier than worrying what mischief they were getting up to in her absence.

Auntie Roberta paid dearly for the return of her dignity. She knew this offspring was the last she’d ever have in her service. Without the ocean, the land was mute of the sound of copulation. Neighbours were unwilling or unable to create future offspring.

“I promised your mommy a strange mercy.”

Auntie Roberta slid the block of wood from the crate door. Her apron held the same knife used to cut the throat of Auntie Balut’s offspring. Used properly, it would do the job just as the neighbour woman Marilyn had demanded:

“Release my daughter from your service, quickly and painlessly,” she had said.

She must have thought Auntie Roberta would use a spell, giving her daughter a final dream of their happy family on a clean ocean before magically stopping her heart. Charming, that the neighbour woman thought spells came as easily to the Aunties as snapping their fingers, but no. Auntie Roberta wasn’t going to waste the effort of a spell on the offspring.

“Come to Auntie.”

The offspring remained in the cramped crate. Normally so eager to get out, this time they crouched on their elbows and knees, eyes opened wide. Monkey noises came from their throat, contractions that normally turned into… what, cheers? Laughter?

In the darkness of the basement, the reflection of the moon beamed from Auntie Roberta’s amulet, shimmering over the steps, filling the crate with its cool, blue light.

“Oh, you like that, eh?”

Auntie Roberta lifted the amulet. The reflection of the moon brightened the clay wall. The offspring rolled onto their back, looking up at the light as it rippled and twinkled, dancing across the wall like friendly ghosts. Purring softly, the offspring threaded an arm into the dirt, cuddling the imaginary mommy tucked lovingly beside them.

Auntie Roberta twirled the amulet between her fingers, sending the moonlight gleaming all over the basement. She hated her sisters, the rest of the Aunties. Since the inception of the universe they had a glorious, renewable pool of fresh neighbours that provided them with everything they needed to survive. And they’d fucked it up irreversibly and for what? A fleeting moment of superiority? Untold riches for the cleverest of speculators? Well, that worked out just great, hadn’t it?

“What a goddamn shame.”

With the last of the shimmering ocean lying cold against her breast, Auntie Roberta pulled the knife from her apron and held up her end of the trade, completing the task faster and more mercifully than any spell she might have cast.

Chris Kuriata lives in St. Catharines, Ontario. His short fiction about elderly poisoners, whale-hunting clowns, ghastly family photographs, and childhood necromancy have appeared in many fine publications. You can read more about his work at www.chriskuriata.wordpress.com

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DP Fiction #27A: “The Things You Should Have Been” by Andrea G. Stewart

“You should have been a doctor,” my mother said. She squinted at me through the screen, as though the new computer I’d bought her had some secret flaw. She never quite trusted that it was better than her old one. “You always liked stitching when you were small. Remember that shirt you made? So many compliments!”

“Mom, it’s a little late for that. I’m thirty-three.” I tugged at the hem of my jacket, my elbows rubbing against the chair’s metal armrests. Fidgeting usually helped me calm my nerves. It didn’t help now. It had seemed simple on paper: five years away from home. Now the only thing I could think of was the blackness of space beyond these metal walls.

“Never too late.” Wisps of gray hair escaped from her bun, brushing the sides of her cheeks. She turned back to the pan on the stove. “You put your mind to something, you can do it. All my children—very capable.”

I could almost smell the soy sauce and chives, the sesame oil on the edge of burning. It made me miss home, more than just a little. “Stitching isn’t the only prerequisite to become a doctor.”

She sliced the air with her chopsticks. “But you’re good at memorizing.”

I focused on the soft glow of the LED lights above my head. “Stitching and memorizing–I’ll be sure to put that on my application. Lei Wong: he once stitched his own shirt.”

“Lei,” she said, “I’m serious.” She disappeared from view and I heard the clink of bottles as she rummaged through the cupboards. I was pretty sure my colleagues’ mothers didn’t cook while they were on vid calls.

“I’m serious too. I’ll update my resume. First thing when I get back.”

She popped into view once more, her face taking up the entire screen. “A lawyer, then. You’re good at arguing. Also good at making your mother feel bad.”

“Do lawyers make their mothers feel bad?”

“The ones who don’t listen do.”

I sighed and shifted in my seat. The cushion was thin, and I could feel the cold metal beneath it. No luxury, here. “I’m trying to listen.”

“Who said I was talking about you? I was talking about lawyers.” She gave a triumphant shrug and lifted the pan, shoveling greens onto a plate. When she was finished, she leaned on the counter, her face in profile. The sunlight from the window trickled into the creases on her temples, highlighted the places on the counter where the laminate had begun to wear away.

A knock sounded on the door behind me. “Two minutes.”

My mother gave me a sideways look. She’d heard it too. Her lips pressed together; her fingers curled around the edge of the countertop. “You could have been a comedian. Just making jokes. All the time. Taking nothing seriously.”

“Mom…”

She pushed away from the counter. “You can still do something else. Anything else.”

“I’ve got two minutes before we leave.”

She shook her head, her brow furrowed. Her hands wove through the air, wildly, like broken-winged birds. “Still enough time! Tell them you changed your mind. They can bring you back.”

They could. They’d never let me leave Earth again, but they could. I thought of returning to California, having my feet on real, solid ground again, standing in my mother’s kitchen and pleating dumplings, the smell of pork and cooked cabbage thick in the air. I couldn’t say it didn’t tempt me.

I checked the clock in the corner of my screen. A little over a minute before we began preparations to initiate the warp drive, before we left the solar system and ventured into the unknown. “But this is what I want to do. I’ve worked my whole life for this.” Hours of study, of physical preparations, of navigating paperwork and interpersonal relationships. “I’ll stay safe.”

My mother closed her eyes. “Always higher, always further, ever since you were a boy. You never knew how to stay safe. You’re thousands of miles away from safe.” Her shoulders hunched. She set the chopsticks down and lined them up until they were parallel, a small space in between. “I know you want to do this, and I’m proud of you, I really am. I’m just not ready.” A wan smile flitted across her face. “Lei Wong: space pilot.”

I gave her a return smile–one I hoped was reassuring despite the flicker of fear in my chest. “I’ll come home.”

She jabbed a finger at the screen. “Good. Maybe then you can try stitching again, instead.”

“I can try. Bye, mom. Love you. Catch you on the flip side.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Probably not a comedian. Not very funny.”

The screen went black.

“Ready?” Susan, my copilot, peeked inside the door.

I put my hands to the armrests, rose to my feet, and took a deep breath, the anxiety in my chest finally easing. “I think so.”

I could have sworn the air smelled of sesame oil.

Author’s Note: This story was inspired by my mom, who can be alternately critical and alternately amazed at what I’ve accomplished–and sometimes both at the same time! I think, for her, my life will always be one of possibilities, even if I’ve set my feet firmly on one path.

Andrea Stewart was born in Canada and raised in a number of places across the United States. She spent her childhood immersed in Star Trek and odd-smelling library books. When her dreams of becoming a dragon slayer didn’t pan out, she instead turned to writing. Her work has appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Daily Science Fiction.

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