Content note (click for details)Content note: This story contains depictions of risks to a child’s safety.
Usually Friend gives me three food pouches after sportsgames, but today only one. He spits it out of his chest slot, and I kick off the bulkhead to snatch it before it gets caught in that jumble of wires over by the vents. When I grab the nearest handhold and swivel in the air for the next one to come, Friend just floats there with his slot closed and his metal arms at his sides.
“Did I do wrong parameters?” I ask.
“Naw, Graciela,” says Friend. “You were grumper to the leez! You sealed your suit with no mistakes, and you dodged all the obstacles on the course. Nineteenth time in a row!”
“If I was grumper to the leez, how come one pouch?” I say. “I’m not a four-year-old anymore.”
“You made enough power on the wheel for almost three hours of XPs! Let’s go play!” says Friend, even though Home would say it’s time for plant care.
“How come one pouch?” I ask again.
“We’ll get more later,” he says, like it’s not a big deal. “You made it to Level 48 last night, remember? Don’t you want to see what happens when you finally connect that switch?”
“No! I did the sportgames and I get the pouches. Fru, and Veg, and Prot! This is just”—I turn over the one pouch—”Veg-9! That’s the worst one!”
“It isn’t so bad.”
“Veg-9 is yuck like a poop smell!” I throw the pouch back at Friend, who catches it fast as a blink. “I’m not proud of you!” I yell at him. “You are not doing great jobs. I’m going to talk to Nurse.”
***
I wish Nurse could give me a hug like she used to, but she had to go into the walls when Friend came. The striped cushions of her body were always warm and smelled like the old CNDY pouches.
I miss CNDY pouches.
I miss Nurse.
Home always says no waste, so the nursery is just another plant-care room now. The round bulge of the baby-growing machine has bottles taped all over, and each one has its own little spinach plant to water. Metal crates stuffed up with kale are bolted to the wall so you can hardly see the smiley sun and the rainbow and the kids holding hands. Before all the plants, whenever Nurse saw me looking at that picture, she would close my hand in her three fabric fingers to practice for being a big sister.
But I’m not a big sister, even though I’m all the way five.
Nurse’s old charging pod is a compost bin now. I dig in the stinky dirt while I tell her about Friend.
“You should apologize, Tender Shoot,” Nurse says from the speaker above the embryo racks. Friend made me a snuggle pillow out of Nurse’s fabric when he came and Nurse left. I keep it up there by her speaker and pretend she’s still there for real.
“But why is Friend doing this?” I ask.
“Rationing has commenced, Graciela,” she says.
“What’s a commence?”
“A beginning.”
“A beginning of what?”
***
It’s really commencing here.
It’s been a whole ten-sleep, and my tummy is making sounds like when Friend boots up. Am I turning into a person like Friend? Will I wake up tomorrow with a slot in my chest for shooting out food pouches?
“I’m too tired for sportsgames today,” I say, when he finds me in my secret hiding place behind the air scrubber.
“Not sportsgames. Something new. Some place new.”
I know every single place in Home. There is no new. Unless… “The No-No Door?”
Friend nods his rectangle head. “First, you need your suit.”
***
Nurse said once that if I ever went through the No-No Door, I’d be hurt worse than anything. When the door slides open, my heart bumps so hard that it shakes the temperature control panel on the chest of my suit. It’s just a small room in there, though, with another door. Is that the real No-No Door?
“You are grumper to the leez, Graciela Han Portuga,” says Friend, through the helmet commie. “And I am proud of you.” He throws me something. I catch it just as the No-No Door closes between us.
“Friend!” I shout.
“Your mission is beginning, Graciela,” says Friend, and it’s the exact words that start the XPs. The same boomy voice, even, not Friend’s normal jokey way of talking. I look down at the multitool in my hand, and that’s the same, too: three types of screwdriver, a knife, a wire-cutter, and a pen weldie.
“It’s just like the XPs!” I say. The little room I’m in is where you go when you lose your hearts and have to start over. “Is it the same outside, too?”
“Find out,” says Friend.
Popping open the control panel to unlock the door is easy, but I have to wedge my feet against the bulkhead and push with my legs just to grind the door open a single bit. A sliver of light shines out into the darkness.
I keep pushing.
My breath is fogging up my helmet by the time I can see what’s there.
The short passageway ends in jagged metal and floating wires. Past the hole is a stretch of Deep Dark and another passageway just as messed up.
I can’t see, but I know where it leads: a giant spaceship busted all apart. It’s broken and empty and dangerous, but you can fix it bit by bit if you’re careful.
That’s my job. For real. Not just in a game.
I feel like I’m back to being four again. Or maybe even three.
“You’re not coming with me?” I ask Friend through my helmet.
“Home, Nurse, Me, we have one job: to raise new humans. We’re not designed for out there. But you, Graciela, your parameters are not so limited. Step by step, you will fix it. And the more you fix, the more humans we can make. And when they are old enough, they can help you.”
“But what happens if I lose all my hearts?”
“Don’t,” says Friend.
That one word makes me scareder even than before. I look out the opening in the door, and all I see in that passageway is the different ways to lose hearts. You can rip your suit on the sharp metal. You can get shocked with the wires. You can jump wrong and float away into the Deep Dark. You can run out of air in your tank.
“Tender Shoot?” comes Nurse’s voice in my helmet commie.
She’s never talked through my helmet commie before, and I turn to look. All I see is that empty little room. An airlock: that’s what they call it in the XPs.
“We’ll be right here with you the whole time,” says Nurse, “like we’re holding hands.”
“All you gotta do right now,” says Friend, “is start at the beginning.”
I turn back to the open door. The beginning is always the same: you’ve got to find better tools for fixing.
“Level One,” I whisper. “Blowtorch.”
“Blowtorch,” agrees Friend. “I’ll be waiting back here when you find it. I saved you a CNDY pouch.”
“Level One: Blowtorch” was written in January 2022, when my youngest son was a toddler. For Christmas, we bought him this little rectangle-headed robot that talked, sang, and rolled back and forth on its tracks. One of the things it said was “Hello, Friend!” Naturally, my son simply called it ‘Friend’.
At first, this struck me as delightful, but the more he spoke of ‘Friend’ like this, the more I realized that, as a kid born square in the middle of 2020 Covid restrictions, his entire conception of the word was tied up in that little robot. This story grew out of the complex emotions that evoked, along with a dose of fear for what lies outside the doors of all our personal airlocks and the courage it takes to step through them.
Jared Oliver Adams lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he writes, explores, and dabbles in things better left alone. He holds two degrees in music performance, a third degree in elementary education, and is utterly incapable of passing a doorway without checking to see if it leads to Narnia. Find him online at www.jaredoliveradams.com.
Lem had existed for all of ten nanoseconds (give or take) when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain pulsing away in the otherwise nothingness of space. She consisted of a conglomeration of particles that had randomly bounced off one another until they spontaneously formed into a structurally-sound and fully functional human brain. Lem came complete with a full inventory of false memories detailing a richly lived life back on a place called Earth. Entities like herself were absurd. That was to say highly improbable, statistically speaking, but no more so than the evolution of intelligent, organic life in the grand scheme of things. Given the unfathomable expanse of all of time and all of space, it was conceivable for a nice Boltzmann brain like Lem to randomly form then quickly dissipate innumerable times at various spots across the cosmos, the general tendency towards thermal equilibrium notwithstanding.
How did she know all that? Lem was unsure how a being only a few nanoseconds old could possess such a sophisticated comprehension of the universe, its laws, and her place in it. Maybe she didn’t. The apparent knowledge was likely one of those annoying false memories she’d recently heard about. That made sense. This bearded, bow-tied Boltzmann fellow was another illusion, much like her strange convictions that she had existed for more than ten nanoseconds, had a girlfriend named Hortense whom she loved very much, and a job in HR which she did not. But she felt utterly certain about all those things. She was as sure of their reality as the fact that she existed.
Lem understood how improbable she was, intuitively at least. The physics came easy, in a flash. The phenomenology not so much. It was one thing for those atoms to randomly form into the structure resembling a human brain, but why did it house the particular memories Lem called her own? She simply shouldn’t be. And yet, there she floated in the void, thinking-therefore-I-am-ing away as the nanoseconds slipped by.
Wait. What was she doing? She had no time to waste. Lem faced a dire situation, existential one even. Her continued survival demanded immediate action.
How exactly was a bodiless brain deprived of oxygen or any other nutrients expected to live in the vacuum? She needed shelter of one kind or another. Lem performed some quick calculations, which astounded her as she clearly remembered telling herself she was no good at math.
She wasn’t expected to survive. She wasn’t meant to be. Lem had, at best, a few zeptoseconds left.
She so badly wanted to say good-bye to Hortense. Give her a squeeze one last time, whoever, wherever, whenever she was.
The Boltzmann brain could not, of course. She possessed no arms with which to hug her Hortense. It didn’t matter. They’d find a way.
Too late.
The atoms forming Lem’s brain rescattered. She ceased to be.
***
Lem had existed for all of nine nanoseconds when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain floating in space. How strange. It all felt oddly familiar. Too familiar, for an inexperienced entity so unimaginably young. Had this happened before? Yes, yes, random particles smashing into a brief existence the structure she called home. Lem remembered now. The déjà vu left her a bit nauseous.
Or maybe she felt sick because she was a solitary brain utterly alone in an extremely empty patch of space. That explanation made even more sense. The prospect was quite terrifying actually. She really wished she hadn’t thought of it. She could now appreciate the value of the shielding provided by those annoying false memories. She tried conjuring a few. That Hortense was cute in a polka dot summer dress. Lem pictured them taking the ferry to someplace called Centre Island. She desperately craved a scoop of pistachio gelato.
What was gelato? It sounded improbably good.
The memories slipped through her non-fingers.
Shit. Lem tumbled into the nothingness. It enveloped her. The brain’s synapses slowed as they struggled to fire in a cold approaching absolute zero.
She wasn’t even the woman she called Lem, the brain realized. Just an unfortunate, accidental slab of meat caught in an astronomically unlikely event.
Calm down, Lem thought. You’ve done this before.
Now, it did seem incredibly unlikely that another set of particles at some other juncture of the universe would smash together in just the right way to form the structure of another functioning human brain with the exact same false memories as the first one along with some vague inklings of the previous iteration’s passing embodiment.
But it wasn’t impossible, statistically speaking, given enough space-time. There seemed like plenty of that around here, if not much else. A plenitude of emptiness surrounded her.
How had that last time ended, exactly? Lem couldn’t recall. Not well, she imagined, given her current situation, what with all the tumbling into the freezing nothingness. Thankfully, the universe had given her a second chance so –
Lem ceased to exist once more.
***
Lem had been Lem again for less than eight nanoseconds.
Here we go again, she thought.
She needed to act quickly. Her time was already running out.
She tried not to contemplate the immeasurable cosmic span that must have passed since her last congregation. Was this even the same universe? Maybe a Big Crunch and another Big Bang had happened in her absence. Hortense probably lay multiple, past universes away from her, unreachable.
No, Lem thought, that line of thinking wasn’t helpful. You can handle this.
Fortunately, she seemed to be getting smarter with each iteration. Smarter, or at least more aware of the problem “at hand” (which essentially meant the same thing given the context). This added knowledge might buy her a bit more time. Maybe she was evolving into a superintelligence.
Nope.
The brain known as Lem ceased.
***
Agnieszka Lem was born in Toronto, Canada on June 6, 1986, to a pair of recent immigrants from Poland. They adored their daughter, like none other. Agnes attended McMurrich Junior Public School followed by Oakwood Collegiate before obtaining her associates degree from George Brown. There she met Hortense Beaujot, who did look rather fetching in a polka dot summer dress. After graduating, Agnes found a job working in the human resources department of a company headquartered in a Davisville office building. She didn’t love it, not like she loved Hortense, but it paid the bills and allowed them to live their lives. They planned on getting married. The world seemed so bright and full of promise. Agnes especially loved those long, languid August evenings which seemed to stretch into forever. Her favorite flavor of gelato was pistachio, obviously. It was the best.
Agnieszka Lem was killed unexpectedly, at age 26, while running late to work. She was struck by a plate glass window falling from the thirty-second floor of a condo tower being built above. Death was immediate. Compensation from the construction company’s insurance was not.
***
Enough already. This needed to stop. Nothingness was everywhere, everywhen. Existence was rare. It slipped by so painfully fast, especially that last time. It hurt.
Lem needed a solution. A few options presented themselves. She would have to either prevent herself from existing again, find a way to exist for more than the blink of an eye (ten thousand years sounded like a nice, round number), or accept her non-fate.
Unfortunately, she found herself as once again an isolated brain occupying a rather unpopulated and quite chilly part of the cosmos. That left her with few options. The fleshy human brain had proven itself an unreliable bit of machinery. Little better in the grand scheme of things than a scoop of pistachio gelato helplessly melting into the August heat. She needed to project her connectome onto a more stable platform.
How exactly she might accomplish this marvelous feat of cosmic bioengineering eluded her, at least in her present, limited state.
Lem would have to wait it out, hope for the best, and try again. She knew the drill by now. Life ended quickly for a brain without much body stranded in the vacuum.
An unavoidable truth occurred to Lem as she waited. She bore no direct relationship to those past selves whose deaths now preoccupied her. Each of them had been a unique being, made of their own separate molecules, dispersed galaxies and eons apart. They had passed from existence and would never again return, as soon so would she. Their lives had never, and could never, touch. Over the immense span of cosmic time countless human brains, countless other Lems even, would have formed at random. The particular circuitry of a select few carried this delusion of having previously existed. Millions of past Lems, so like her in every other respect, had not. Neither this neural architecture nor this belief made her special in significant way. She was neither being rewarded with some bizarre form of immortality nor getting punished for any sin she’d committed. She was simply a Boltzman brain endowed with a rich trove of false memories, destined to last for a few solitary seconds, no more.
Jeez, it was all kind of depressing when she thought about it. Nothing quite captured the futility of existence than a human brain sparking into existence in the vacuum of space for a few fleeting seconds before perishing. Well, that and getting stuck working for HR.
Poof. No more Lem.
***
At five nanoseconds of age, Lem knew a few things for certain. She was a Boltzmann brain floating in space. She was highly improbable, statistically speaking, but not an impossibility. Her situation had not improved, not whatsoever. Different emptiness, same problem.
Fuck me and fuck this universe. Next.
***
Seriously, what are the odds? No, just no.
***
Cold, empty, alone. Exposed synapses pulsing into the void, the brain considered the freedom promised by her current situation. Yes, freedom. Dire as everything seemed (the countdown had already started ticking away in her mind), the isolation provided by the nothingness meant she could become whatever she wished. The past did not define her. How could it? Her past consisted of an accidental set of false memories. As did the thing the brain had grown accustomed to calling Lem. In reality, the self crawling about her neural architecture remained soft, unformed clay. The brain knew all of this for three whole nanoseconds. And yet, as the vacuum reclaimed her, she wished for nothing more than to remain the Lem she had always been.
***
Another Lem formed. No, Lem formed again. Only, this time felt different. She still lacked what she understood as her own body, but Lem no longer felt like she was Boltzmann brain floating in space. Everything felt quite solid, crowded even. Warm, but not like that immeasurable instant of pain when she’d formed in what must have been the core of a newborn star. She found her current surroundings pleasantly not alarming. It was probably one of those pesky false memories. They must have callusedlike a shell around her, protecting her from the inevitable truth. Lem was thankful for the kindly illusion’s persistence.
She waited for the overwhelming nothingness to seep in. And waited.
But she neither fell nor slowed. The inevitable cold refused to take over.
This time was different, apparently.
Lem explored.
It seemed she had formed in/as a supercomputer. No, she’d formed as the goddess worshipped by a mildly psychic squid-like race. Same difference as far as she was concerned. Lem felt steady for the first time in many lives.
Many generations ago, the squid-scientists had begun constructing the first primitive version of her, modeled on their own axons. Now, she pulsed planetwide, crunching numbers and providing solutions. She spanned continents, sending electric pulses across the surface of their massive, watery world. The squids had designed her to answer their most unanswerable questions about the meaning of existence. She had, long ago. A certain wisdom came from having lived many lives, no matter how curtailed.
The squid-scientists still tended her. Their love and dedication allowed her to grow. She was quietly becoming the largest computer yet known. A small gift for all she had given them. Time was hers now. They wanted her to explore for herself.
But where to go? The squid folk expressed little interest in defying the gravity of their immense world. The upper atmosphere spelt death for them. Death. An unwanted feeling overtook Lem. She pictured a solitary brain spontaneously coming into being in the void of space and passing almost instantly as the first floods of consciousness took hold.
Shit. She had been so preoccupied with her own meagre survival that she’d failed to think through the full implications of her situation. Whatever she remembered experiencing in the vacuum had occurred billions of other times to billions of others, each Boltzmann brain endowed with a unique set of undeniably-real-feeling false memories. That included –
“I must find Hortense before it’s too late.”
A hush fell across the squid-scientists working the machine, those privileged few who lucked into hearing those words finally spoken. The name was a sacred one to even the most agnostic of them.
“Yes, find her by any means you can,” they responded, as each blessed themself with a tentacly gesture.
“But I don’t know how.” Panic pervaded Lem’s system, causing it to overheat. “Where am I even? She could form galaxies, no universes, from here. She could have lived for the last time billions of years ago or won’t be born for an eon yet. You’ve barely breached the surface of your closest moon. Where do we start? I’ll never see her again. It’s impossible.”
“No, it’s simply highly improbable,” replied the head squid-scientist. She couldn’t fathom the odds of chancing into this essential role in a conversation long foretold by her people. The one with the poor, near-infinite goddess who still failed to understand. “This is a minor problem, given enough time.”
Yes. As improbable as it sounded, some Lem or another would eventually encounter Hortense. The perspective granted by many lives lived (however briefly) told her so. The two of them must meet again, inevitably, given the expanse of time. In that regard, her current form did hold certain advantages.
If Lem had possessed the body she once imagined for herself in each of those other iterations, she would have let out a sigh. Sometimes things were just easier when you formed as a brain floating in the nothingness of space. Such a fleeting existence, free of all responsibility, was not without its comforts.
Author’s Note: Boltzmann brains are theoretically possible (if highly undesirable) objects in cosmological theory. I found myself intrigued by them and wanted to write a story that featured one as a protagonist. This proved challenging as they would be extremely rare entities (to put it mildly), only existing for a fraction of a moment in the nothingness of space. So I decided to add a few more and string them together. As the title suggests, my story is very much about what exactly counts as the self, where it starts and how does it end. What would be the psychology of your median Boltzmann brain? Would it prove or refute the neuro-reductionism that we are at our core our brains and nothing more? What kind of stories would such a mind tell themselves during their micro-blink of existence? I leave it to the reader to decide if Lem is one (repeatedly unlucky in her circumstances) or many (each afflicted with a similar false belief).
M. J. Pettit is an undisciplined academic, a longtime reader of short fiction, and an occasional writer of stories. His fiction has previously appeared in Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Small Wonders, among other venues. He divides his time between Toronto, Canada and Manchester, UK as well as other places. More information about his fiction is available on his website.
Content note (click for details)Content note: death of a child
Do not distribute, the feds don’t take kindly to these handouts.
INTRODUCTION
Hey, kid. Ol’ Buddy here, your favourite underground, pamphlet-writing canuck. I hope, whoever and wherever you are, you’re well. Keep the generator full, the firewood chopped, and the contraband hidden.
Yeah, I said the next guide was going to be about rainwater collecting, but this topic is pretty fucking overdue for a pamphlet. File a complaint, if that bothers you. (Too bad this is real paper, asshole! No comment section!)
Those idiots in the US-of-fucking-A would have you believe drones are state-of-the-art, heavy-duty, kevlar-coated BULLSHIT. They’re called drones for a reason, see? Because the military drones on about them. Like if the marketing has six different hyphenated words for ‘expensive’, they’ll become invincible.
I know you’ve lost someone to these drones. I sure have. It doesn’t matter how many people you lose, grief always finds a new way to sneak up and sucker-punch ya, trap you under 500 tons of black seawater and make you think there’s no way to fight back.
But drones aren’t invincible. And I’m going to show you how easy they come down.
Now come on. Get up before dawn and make some coffee, if you can spare the water ration. Start your car while it’s still cold enough to see your breath, grab your 20-gauge pump, and stuff your pockets full of shotgun shells. Then get your ass in gear. You and your dear ol’ Buddy are going hunting.
GEAR
Obviously, the feds aren’t going to sell you camo gear and guns since Canada lost the war and big brother America moved in. But get your hands on other stuff: hippies, or waders. Big warm coats. Ear protection. (Why ear protection, you ask? Anyone who’s ever fired a shotgun is laughing at you, kid. But it’s alright. You’ll learn.)
See what you can find at MEC or SAIL, or call up that one guy you know who can get anything if you pay well and don’t ask questions. But you stay warm, and you stay dry, okay? Buddy’s rules.
When my son Colton and I go hunting, I make sure he’s so bundled up he looks like a linebacker. Same applies to you, kid.
These drones are tiny, they’re moving, and the best way to shoot them down is to hit their propellers, so rifles are out. A single round from a rifle is a near-guaranteed miss, and a high-velocity bullet can travel pretty damn far before coming down, which means you have no idea what it might hit. Grab yourself a shotgun instead—it’ll give you a wide spread, and because the drones need to fly low under the treetops, they’ll be nicely in range.
You ever hunt duck? I figure it’s the same principle, only ducks don’t come kevlar-coated.
DRONE TYPES
I separate drones into three categories: Surveillance, Sporting, and OH SHIT.
Surveillance: These are your run-of-the-mill drones, your bread and butter. Recognizable features include ugly grey/green paint, lots of lights, and cameras mounted to their bellies that gleam like the eyes of our all-American god.
Sporting: Used by men rich enough to afford hunting permits, they’re big and quiet, with custom paint jobs, wi-fi signals, and pricy cameras.
Kid, I know how this sounds. That’s expensive gear, you’re thinking. If I shot one down, it’d see my family through winter. They’d be so proud.
Fuck, I know the temptation. But you gotta listen to ol’ Buddy when he says LEAVE THEM ALONE. The second one of those drones goes down, a phone goes up, a call goes to Washington, and the government comes hunting you. Understand?
That’s how you die.
OH SHIT: That’s what you’ll say when you see ’em. Military hunting drones. The ones designed to hunt YOU. (That’s why you’re reading this, right? You’ve seen what happens when those drones come out to play. Or you’ve heard stories. Or, right now, you’re as deep in the woods as you know how, waiting for them to pump you full of more lead than you thought could fit inside a person. It’s okay. Deep breath, kid. We’re gonna get you out of this.)
HUNTING
The first rule: GO TO THE DRONES. I cannot state that loud enough. Here, I’ll do it again. GO. TO. THE. DRONES.
Yes, that scares you, but let’s play out two scenarios.
In the first, you kill a drone in the woods. Within hours that whole area is overrun with sniffer dogs and fucks with automatic rifles, if you’re lucky. It’ll be OH SHITs if you’re not. Scenario two, you’ve listened to ol’ Buddy. You go to the drones’ charging pads and pick them off on their own turf. Then they’ve got no way of knowing where you came from or where you’re going.
Then, you’ll live.
This shouldn’t bear mentioning, but the first time you fire a shotgun better not be now. Practice beforehand or you’ll die of embarrassment before the feds have time to make you die of something else. First time Colton fired a shotgun, it knocked him on his ass so hard I thought the poor boy was going to be concussed.
So here you are, at the asscrack of dawn with ol’ Buddy, parked in a copse of tamarack trees, near a lake that America is slurping dry as the spoils of war. You’ve had your coffee, warmed your hands on the radiator, and we’re ready to roll.
Set up well out of range of the cameras, sensors, and barbed wire around the charging pad. You’ve already done your due diligence checking the site and making sure they can’t see you before you start hunting, because you’re not a dumbass. (Need help? See if you can find a copy of BUDDY RAYMOND’S NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO CASING THE JOINT)
Now what?
First, timing. The drones that fly by night roost at these charging pads before heading back to base. We’ll set up before sunrise, and catch them coming in low as a flock. Drones only transmit live feed to base if the algorithm senses an anomaly. But they record everything and upload it for review when they’re locked in and charging.
This means there’s a pretty twenty-two second window when they’re not transmitting. When they’ve pinged home base as Returned, but haven’t actually crossed that barbed wire fence. That’s when we hit. And you better hit hard, kid. Think about whoever you’ve lost to these goddamned drones. Get so mad your teeth ache with it. Then pay America back in bullets, the only language they understand.
POST-HUNT
So you’ve shot down your first drone and you’re feeling like a million bucks. And you should! Good shooting! Ol’ Buddy is so damn proud of you, kid.
But you ain’t clear yet. If you wanna take home drone souvenirs, DON’T LEAVE THE SITE!
All drones got a GPS tracker under their front left wing, and you’re gonna need to take that out. If you want to give those fucks in Washington something to chew on, grab a slingshot and fire it over the fence. Buys you more than just time to get gone—a broken drone means no military, just a technician sent out to fix it.
Kid, if you don’t mind, I’m going to imagine you’re like my son. Colton’s a lanky boy. Scruffy hair. Teenage acne. A little boneheaded (he got that from his daddy) and always stealing my coats. But a good heart. He wouldn’t stick around to hassle those technicians, and neither will you. They’re poor suckers trying to afford water for their families, same as the rest of us.
Besides, taking potshots at technicians is a surefire way to get military eyes on your locale. And I already told you that’s how you die.
Once the GPS tracker is dealt with, take that drone back to your commune, your trailer, your little hovel. Then start stripping it for parts. For tips and tricks, ask around and get your hands on BUDDY RAYMOND’S NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO REPURPOSING AMERICAN MILITARY HARDWARE.
But I’ll tell you this: everything in that drone can be reused. Hell, if you’ve got some hacking know-how, you can turn it into a productive member of society. (The hardware connection ain’t hard—drones all use USB-C. Lazy fucking Americans.)
WHEN IT GOES WRONG
Sometimes, you fuck up. It’s not your fault, kid. We’ve all done stupid shit to make the ones we love proud. But there’s a chance you won’t have the luxury of hunting drones on your terms.
Sometimes, the drones are hunting you.
And maybe you’re in the woods, alone. You’re scared. Can’t go home, not with a drone on your tail. Can’t plan, or run. You’ve got a jammed shotgun, a big coat, and more bravery than a kid your age should have, but that ain’t gonna matter. Your daddy is going to find you far, far too late.
Deep breath. You’re gonna get out of this, okay? Listen to ol’ Buddy. Those algorithms are trained to sense things out of the ordinary: strange colours, movement, human shapes. So you gotta blend in.
If you’ve got camo on, go low. Hide your face and bury yourself under cold leaves, rocks, and long grasses. It’ll take hours for those drones to give up. Don’t move, even if your arm is asleep and your leg is cramping and you have to piss so bad you think you’re going to explode. Even if you think you’ve been there long enough. Even if you think it’s impossible for them to still be looking.
If you’ve got no camo gear because today you took your daddy’s warm red coat with you, the one you haven’t quite grown into yet, turn it inside out. Roll in the mud, even if it makes your teeth chatter and your fingers numb. Rub dirt and moss through your hair. See if you can find a cave to hide in. Don’t move.
Please kid, don’t move. Wait for someone to come find you.
After hours and hours, after you’ve swung from scared to bored to self-loathing and back again so many times your brain feels numb, if you really, really, truly think you’re safe…
Move slow. Twitch a finger. Curl your hand. Shift your arm. Your head and torso move last, understand? A bullet to your arm, even a dozen, hurt bad. But they won’t hurt near as bad as one to the head.
You’re going to get home, kid, because you followed Buddy’s advice.
Your daddy won’t have to find you, hours later, cold and still in that bright red coat. Your daddy won’t have to realize it ain’t the bright red of the coat he’s seeing, but the blood soaked through the fabric.
Your daddy won’t be too late.
CONCLUSION
So there you have it. Another Buddy Raymond guide, straight from my printer to your hands.
I don’t normally like my pamphlets distributed, but for this one I’m making an exception. Give this to everyone you know. Everyone with a chip on their shoulder. Everyone who lost someone because I didn’t write this goddamned guide sooner.
Now, grab your gear, grab your gun, and get going. Go kill every fucking drone from Bonavista to Vancouver Island, and tell ’em Colton’s dad sent you.
Author’s Note: I’ve always thought there’s something really interesting about combining very old ways of doing with hyper-new ways of being. Duck are ancient animals. Drones are a new technology. And yet, it seemed plausible that in some dystopia five minutes into the future, some backwater hunter would just reuse duck-hunting methods to fight new threats. Originally, this guide was part of a larger piece, but I found as I wrote it that I was far more interested in the opinionated hunter writing the guide than anything else, so I got out of his way and let him do the talking.
Gillian Secord is a speculative fiction writer and Aurora Award finalist from Toronto, Canada, whose work has appeared in Fireside Magazine, Cossmass Infinities, and others. When she’s not writing, she’s scouring the city for good coffee shops and collecting vinyl. She has two cats and has yet to convince either of the fuzzballs to pay rent. You can find her online at gilliansecord.wordpress.com and on twitter @GillianSecord.
They hold each other in the shallow cool of an August night, two among many in a backyard arced in string-lights, wrapped up in the music and the celebratory ethereality of a wedding. They dance together like it’s theirs, in a moment that is just itself and what they are within it.
* * *
When they woke it was in what little pocket warmth they’d accumulated between their bodies in the night, clinging together in a sleeping bag as if without the other they would forget how to breathe, or why. When Nash cracked his eyes open to take in this reality it was to Vicky watching him, her face as beautiful as everything behind it, a moment of naked love in which they both wished that they could remain lying here like this, frozen in stasis. Neither needed to say it.
But time moved on. Inexorable, mechanical as a wave in the ocean, as the dissolve of light into dark. They knew it was time to go when Vicky mumbled that he needed to brush his teeth, and Nash said that she’d had too much to drink last night.
“Well, how else am I going to sleep through this?” she snapped, pulling away from him.
“You’re the one who wants to cram us into this one bag,” Nash said. “Not my fault that you can smell my breath—”
“Stop.”
They took a moment to recollect, looking first at the tent walls, then the travel bags at their feet.
“I guess it’s time to go,” Vicky said.
They emerged into a winter in stasis, here in this relic world. The ground cold and hard-packed, overhung by bare trees. Gray sky.
“I’ll get the tent down,” Nash said.
“I’ll pack up,” Vicky said. This was how they handled the moments when the future came too close, advancing behind the fiery orange and red tendrils of the wave that separated it from this world of the past. It brought preliminary effects: budding trees, shoots of green grass, mild warmth that whispered with the summer.
For living things, its effects were the beginning of the state that they would be in, once the time-wave passed over them and brought them days? years? into the future. Like foreshocks to a temporal earthquake, and what waited on the other side?
For Vicky and Nash, it meant that they started fighting. Building up walls and nurturing resentments. Making plans to leave. Once they outran those foreshocks, got beyond the effects, regret filled them and they made up.
Which meant that whatever era of their lives existed beyond the wave, in the future, didn’t involve them together.
And so they ran, the last of the living on this side of time, defying the mechanical, unceasing advance of loss—struggling to stay together, and in love.
* * *
Neither could remember how long they’d been here. Living in this world of the past meant that one’s perception simplified to a moment-by-moment basis, shedding the artificial measurements of hours and days. But here, in this unceasing end? Anything beyond the moment was hard to understand. A freedom in that, at first.
But now, when they woke from scant hours of sleep, suffering those preliminary effects, bitterness and resentment led each to privately wonder a terrible option… so they just went through the motions. Pack up. Get in the car. Eat breakfast on the road. Start talking when the shame from holding those resentments built, then gave way.
Yet there was only so much land left. The geography had gone flat, and though they didn’t know what the road signs for exits and dead towns meant, they knew that these were coastal plains; soon they would smell the ocean.
“We’ll find a boat,” Nash said.
Vicky took his hand. “I don’t know how to steer one. Do you?”
“No.”
She ran her thumb over the back of his hand. “We’ll figure it out, then.”
But they both knew that they couldn’t get a boat running, not before the wave reached them. Before the future did.
* * *
Vicky missed her family. Nash his friends, because they were more like family to him. She couldn’t help wishing that she was back home, speeding down the highway as the sun set over cornfields and a thunderstorm rolled in across the miles. He wanted to stand out on the porch after the rain left and birdsong returned, and the fresh sunlight glittered over puddles in the driveway.
They’d had to leave their dog behind. Neither one could remember him fully, but when they started talking about him it all came back. Who was with him now? If the wave passed over them, would he still be there, back home, waiting for whichever one took him?
Time had nearly overrun them once before, when they’d crossed the mountains with those crooked switchbacks inching them along. But the wave passed over everything in a line, unstoppable—it had come so close that the sky lit aflame with orange and red aurora streaks whipping the sky and land, while phantom leaves eased into being and cars like ghosts materialized. Their screaming match had left them in tears. Vicky had been driving, and finally shouted, “If I’m that bad, then why don’t I just hit the fucking brakes?” And Nash spat, “Because you’re scared.”
That night, lying in the sleeping bag, far enough away from the wave to apologize again and again and believe it, Nash whispered, “I’m scared, too.”
“Is that why we’re still doing this?”
He brushed her bangs from her eyes. “Because we love each other, too.”
“But are we running for love? Or to get away from what’s on the other side?” She paused, then answered her own question. “Both, I guess.”
“Is that…” Nash swallowed. “Is that any reason to stay here? In the past?”
Vicky blinked back more tears—why did she cry so much, being with him? “I don’t know. Isn’t that… most relationships? Sometimes it’s love, sometimes it’s because that’s what we know and we stay because it’s less scary than leaving?”
“I don’t want that to be why.”
“Me, neither.” She kissed him, held him. And they both kept silent the same fear they harbored: What happened when they reached the ocean?
* * *
When they passed the first road sign that announced the distance to the beach, Nash asked, “What’s your favorite memory of us?”
Vicky gave a strained, but real smile. She said, “When we ran off to Seattle.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Just… running off with this wonderful guy. But the moment itself, it was when we were sitting on the patio at that restaurant that looked out over the water. Remember that place?”
“The one with the trout?”
Vicky laughed. “You ordered it but didn’t know they serve the entire fish. The look on your face when they brought it out was just so… real. And cute.”
“Never ordering trout again.”
“But we were just sitting there, couldn’t have been more than half an hour. The sun was out, and all the people were walking by and I looked over at you and you were doing the same thing I was. Just taking in the world. And that was it. That was all I needed, was being in a new city, with you. You were the only thing that was solid for me, in the middle of all this strange newness. Like an anchor.”
Nash squeezed her hand.
“What about you?” she asked.
“It’s dumb.”
“No it’s not. What is it?”
He smiled, keeping his eyes on the road. “Remember when we went to the Fair last year?”
Vicky rolled her eyes. “Not really. Not after the fourth margarita… that night is your favorite? I was blackout drunk.”
“Okay, not that part of it. But it was… I don’t know, when I got you to the car, pretty much carrying you and you were singing ‘Don’t Stop Believing.’”
Vicky groaned and he laughed, but not in a mean way.
“And I got you into the car and drove us back, and you were mumbling about the pigs in the petting zoo, how you wanted one as a pet—”
“I still do.”
“But then you fell asleep, pressed up against the window.” He paused, swallowed through the hitch in his throat. “You needed me right then and I was there. Helping you, I guess… being your man. Just carrying you home.”
She watched him watching the road. Then leaned over the console and into him as best she could, face buried into his neck while he held an arm around her with the other on the steering wheel, wanting more than anything to pull over and hold her back. Eventually, she started to wish he’d changed into a different shirt, but he was always doing that, just picking up whatever piece of clothing was in sight, even off the floor. And he wanted her to take over more of the driving, he was tired and sore and he always had to take the lead.
They separated, back to their sides of the car.
* * *
But there was another memory. Profound for both of them, and maybe if they had mentioned it to each other it would have displaced the patio in a new city, and the late-night drive carrying her home, because for it to be held so deeply by both of them would have made it more than their independent moments. But they hadn’t told each other, hadn’t had the time.
Two of their friends were married in a backyard on an evening in August—the two who had connected Vicky and Nash in the first place—so they were both in the wedding party, had even walked down the aisle together in a bridesmaid dress and groomsman tux like precedents to a different dress and tux. After the service it was dinner and cake and drinks under tents in the backyard, speeches, and as the sun sank the DJ started the music.
Neither of them remembered the night with much coherency, thanks to the open bar. But the clearest moment wasn’t the ceremony, the speeches, any of that.
It was when they’d been dancing, alongside all these friends and strangers, under string-lights with the grass cushioning their sore feet, the music meaning little more than what moved their bodies together and held their eyes in lockstep. A moment—just a light on a string of them, but it glowed brighter than the others. It ended and yet it never ended, swelling into a presence real and powerful and continuing on as separate memories to exist in shared pocket-time, the closest thing to eternity that there really is.
* * *
They sat in the car, staring out at the lifeless gray ocean. No wind, no surf, nothing out there toward where it banded into the featureless sky, because this relic world of the past had lost even its natural phenomenon.
Already Vicky wanted to be anywhere he wasn’t. And Nash just wanted to be alone.
When they walked out onto the beach, stumbling a bit in the loose sand, they kept a wary distance from each other. A marina stood far up the shoreline, but neither had brought up the possibility of taking one of the boats. They resented the other for the four years wasted. Part of them couldn’t believe that they’d been considering marriage—although that was held with the knife-stab agony of having been so close to it.
A beach without surf, without waves dragging fingers up and down the skin of the earth. Elements trapped together and refusing each other. They had stayed here for too long. You couldn’t outrun time no matter how hard you tried, or how much it hurt.
The sky began to lighten. Tufts of beachgrass sprouted, hair on a newborn’s head. Phantom gulls flickered along the sand, their squawking the voice of the sky. The air itself vibrated, and as Nash and Vicky faced each other tendrils of orange and red reached around and between them—thin at first, then thickening, the ligaments of time itself.
He saw her in the autumn night, leaning against the window as he drove her home. She saw the man sitting across the table in a new city. They danced in the August night.
In a moment of fear, they wrapped their arms around not the targets of loathing they were trapped with, but around the only human comfort in this place. A bitter part of them wondered if that was all they had ever been: gripping to the first readily available comfort in this void.
The wave rushed over them, the inexorable mechanical washing forward of time. Among the oranges and reds emerged a core of purple, a deep sunset kiss settling over and around and in them—removing them from the beach and each other’s arms into futures separate and holding for the other memories and regrets and the hope that the other was doing better than when they’d ended things and that they didn’t hate each other really but were too ashamed to cross the breach into some kind of I-miss-you friendship while remembering not the agony of how they’d ended or even the excitement of how they began and not even the anchor in a new city or driving her home but a night in August. And even after they’d long since lost most of those images, the emotion of that night still held the summation of what they’d been at their best, not erasing their worst but holding against it, a moment and memory resting as a light on a string of them in the dark.
* * *
They hold each other in the shallow cool of an August night, two among many in a backyard arced in string-lights, wrapped up in the music and the celebratory ethereality of a wedding. They dance together like it’s theirs, in a moment that is just itself and what they are within it.
Author’s Note: This story was inspired by Ben Howard’s dark, haunting, beautiful song, “Time is Dancing.” Listening to it, I see lovers at their last dance, knowing that what they have between them is ending, but finding themselves, for the duration of a song, in love again—during which the aftermath doesn’t matter, but instead only what they are, together, in that moment. From there I set them running from that end, defying inevitability by stretching that last moment out beyond its natural limit—until finally giving it up.
John Stadelman (he/him) is a writer from North Carolina now based in Chicago. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College, and his recent fiction has appeared in Freedom Fiction, Schlock!, Dark Horses Magazine and elsewhere, and he is currently at work on a novel. Although he doesn’t believe in ghosts, he’s pretty sure he saw a Chupacabra one night on the North Side. Stalk him on Twitter at @edgy_ashtray.
The surface of the iceberg has long had its taste of bitter cuisine: shimmering snow, wriggling bacterial filament, microplastic granules from the stolen boat you steered across the choppy Arctic waves. But this is new: the woody whisper of your matrilineal family map. The iceberg leeches the warmth from the paper, like sucking air through teeth, trying to latch on— but you bend, shake the map, and tuck it back into your pocket.
Scraping into the snow: your ice drill, the auger bit modified using forbidden ancestral smithery. Encased around the drill: your gloved hands. Encased within your hands: a flourishing commune of microflora.
And so you begin.
Two feet down and you’re already dislodging organisms frozen one hundred years ago, the briny Marinobacter arcticus, the somber Trichinella nativa that lurks in the intestinal cysts of walruses. One tusk of said genus had lain undisturbed in the ice for one hundred and twelve years. Your drill shatters it on its press deeper. Had you tasted the bone-laced melt, you would have savored a bitter lick of seawater that housed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the lively microorganism who tore apart your mother through her exile. They are frozen with her still, on the glacier from which this iceberg calved. Even now, your intestinal microphages sing her elegy.
Twenty feet down, and you are the first human in twelve hundred years to descend through this ice beneath sea level. Your pituitary gland releases a gush of ancestral recognition: crackling adrenaline for your Streptococcus salivaris to drink. You hammer a pike into the wall and knot your glacier rope. Although you do not know it, the permafrost pulses around you as your salivaris celebrate. The iceberg wants to taste them. The iceberg wants to taste you.
Thirty-five feet down. When you scrape the marker across the ice, you scrape free a colony of nasty Golocii dendramens that haven’t frequented the Arctic since 500 BCE. Do you sense them? Their straining to be free? Or perhaps their more patient twin, the Golocii yuoua, whose steps stalk from cell to cell of foetal narwhals until it can climb the limbs of frostbitten fishermen?
They are not all bad, and that is a promise; after all, their voices, and the voices of their progeny, have crooned such an insightful chorus through the millennia. And millennia you enter, at forty feet down, where the ice is so consuming and crystalline it has perfectly preserved a prehistoric snow-vole and all the nematodes teeming between its whiskers. Your scientists would froth to dislodge it and send it home to their institutions, but what of the nematodes then? The nematodes know their home; they whisper of the fear and the ecstasy of the tundra, the warmth of passing from mother to daughter.
You are halfway down the iceberg, now. You know what you seek. Night has fallen, and the ice barely reflects the dim gleam of the stars far above. Your hands have long gone numb and aching; your drill is weary, but its reinforcement holds—the flutes swallowing the shredded ice upon contact, the auger humming on your deck prior as your compass of final precision. A testament to your long nights at the forge, where you sweated over the spiraling steel, disbelieving the implications of the manual, afraid of what your creation would allow you to unearth.
You cast your gaze upward, surveying the dark, narrow walls of your borehole. This far submerged, the round yellow glow of your headlamp feels like desecration.
At fifty feet, the color of the ice changes. Your flashlight illuminates fractalled black, like the pluming ink of a giant squid, hauntingly beautiful in its etchings. When you press your gloved hand to the wall, its heartbeat pulses against your palm.
You pull your hand back, adjust your earplugs. You do not hear it, but you feel the humming in your ribs: all the iceberg’s denizens are singing. Beckoning.
Your mother’s blood lashes hot in your ears.
Forimanifera saladaati wants to meet you so badly, but it is stuck in free fall from when it pirouetted from a piece of meteorite matter and onto the ice ten million years ago. Dedratida namita does not know it, but its great-times-ten-thousand-grandchild lurked on the door handle when your mother came home from school to tell your grandparents of your untimely conception. After they struck her, that grandchild blistered her bleeding lip.
And when your mother kissed your father for the last time, before he left his job, left to leave forever, that grandchild tasted the condemnation of her peers, no, her nation, no, your planet, in the slick space between his tooth and tongue.
Eibrans thyssambria’s distant progeny was rusting the safe when, two decades later, you drugged your grandparents, broke the combination lock, and stole these coordinates.
The iceberg hums, eager, to the beat of your fury.
And dimly, so dimly you believe you are hallucinating at first and must shut off your headlamp: a light, pulsing beneath your feet. Within the light, jetés in live sequence: Thusina dansii, who felled a hundred thousand hominids in the Pleistocene epoch; Goethye frustoac, who gave rise to the first continental death of forest that became modern oil. They are joyous; they are waiting.
The light licks at the edges of your vision, humming a song of the depths, beseeching you to lay down, lay down and be still forever, but you start your drill again and its ancient singing bares its teeth. The auger destroys: it absorbs the light below, refracts the light above, dashes the light against the rocks. Through this chaos you descend.
You drill deeper, until you’re surrounded by the glow of the curved ice around you, and below you it is brighter still. Here the hum of your bones is so dense you must drill or die, and then a shadow slowly unchips from the glow beneath your feet, until you are tracing a blurry human silhouette.
Here you switch to a thick-bristled brush and calcium chloride, that liquid eager to eat the ice, and fall to your subzeroed hands and knees. Each brushstroke brings greater definition, then skin: you free a withered arm; you defrost a brittle shoulder; and, by centimeters, you finally chip clarity into the face.
I stare up at you.
The long-breathless bacteria, the viruses in stasis, are all in frenzy, to the beat of my endocrinal glands, to the wet swish of your heart. Grandchild witnesses great-great-millennia-old grandmother, and the prescience of mind of her and all her bacterial children, deep in her grandest horde. You are soaked in bacterial musk; you are Noah’s vengeful ark, unearthing ancient horror to bring back to your masses.
I could not be prouder.
With shaking hands, you paint me out of the ice, and though I cannot move, you feel my eyes in the flagella of billions of bacteriocytes tracking your every movement. Clutching my frail body in your arms, you take one shuddering breath, for your mother. Then you cup a frozen hand against my cheek in supplication.
Trillions of my children scream.
I accept.
A seismic shift in allegiance. An entire world distills into your eyes: your severed ancestral cradle, and all its progeny, and every venomous inhabitant. We beat in unified time with your pulse, with your breaths, with you.
Your grand matrilineal secret: unearthed at last, and wanting.
With trembling arms you lay me into the indent from which I came, to my final, easy rest. Every cell of the iceberg sighs.
You loop your foot into your rope, with vengeance.
Soaked with the teeming eagerness of millennia, you begin to climb.
Author’s Note: I was inspired to write this story two years ago after a friend sent me this craft article by Lincoln Michel about story engines. Michel mentioned that an iceberg can be a story structure (referencing a tweet by writer Jeff Jackson). I thought, how can I construct a story like an iceberg? Here is the result.
Sara S. Messenger is a speculative fiction writer and poet residing in New England, USA. She is currently in her post-college life stage of Working and Thinking a Lot About Art. Her short fiction can be found in Fantasy Magazine and The Year’s Best Fantasy, Vol. 2, as well as previously in Diabolical Plots. Her speculative poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons. She reads submissions for speculative short fiction venues PodCastle and khōréō magazine. Her full portfolio can be found online at https://sarasmessenger.com.
Of course a dybbuk is flat. Flat as a blini. All the easier for that damn ghost to slip under your collar.
Of course a dybbuk is colorless. That’s why, when you say you’ve got a dybbuk, most people say, no you don’t. Go see Dr. Weiner. Spend a few days in Florida.
And of course a dybbuk can stretch like a goddamn balloon animal. So it can stick. Sometimes to fridges. More often to living people, to their familiar messes and warm smells, but not always. Some folks insist that dybbuks full-on possess people, make them fly around, screeching, like giant fruit bats dressed in their funerary finest. Those people are yutzes.
So. We come to the first day of Louie’s shiva. All the expected mourners show up. Larry. Bekah. And look at this: Some kid. Marla. Bekah assumes she’s Larry’s torah student. Larry assumes she’s Bekah’s second cousin once removed. But let’s be honest: nobody cares. Nobody asks. After an hour or so of being thus ignored, Marla drifts into the kitchen and makes herself useful scrubbing dishes.
And that’s when Louie’s widow, Dory, spots a dybbuk. Happens just as she’s adjusting a sheet hanging over a dining-room mirror. There it is, inching along the wall toward the sideboard. Well, if you’re raised right, you don’t care whether that ghost is Louie’s or not. You stab it with a pickle fork and throw it out the window before it can stick to a full-on person, and that’s what Dory does.
Marla stares out the window, watching the dybbuk coast like a frisbee into a riot of neglected crabgrass.
“Good for him,” Marla says. “He loved green things.”
She’s just put her egg salad on the sideboard. It’s festooned with fresh dill and parsley and chives from her kitchen garden, and everyone hates it. Not because they’ve tried it, but because Dory asked what was in it, and who doesn’t bother to put Miracle Whip in an egg salad?
Marla goes back into the kitchen.
We come to the second day of the shiva. Larry comes out of the bathroom. It’s the one — and this is important — decorated in tans and golds. Larry announces that somebody’s kid needs to be sent to his room, because one of Bekah’s latkes is stuck to the bathroom wall next to the towels. The only reason Larry even spotted it is because he almost touched it. Could’ve gotten his hands all greasy.
Bekah hears this and says, “I didn’t bring any latkes.”
The whole shiva races to the bathroom. Bekah has the pickle fork this time.
The dybbuk goes sailing out the bathroom window, landing on a dirt smear that once featured a fennel plant taller than your teenager.
Marla says, “He did love that garden.”
Dory rolls her eyes.
“He was on oxygen,” she says. “Bedridden. Did you even know him?”
“Oh yes. We met on Reddit. In a group about container gardening.”
The whole room looks at Marla like she just landed in a pod.
Later, of course, they go home for the night. All of them except Dory, who is stuck living there, with her stinking, choking grief, and her utter certainty about everything. There’s also Marla, who, if we’re being honest, doesn’t have much else to do.
Marla goes outside. She finds the dirt smear. Now she has the pickle fork.
She brings the dybbuk inside. Dory’s eyes are swollen like golf balls and her nose looks like a sour cherry, but she manages to say, “He couldn’t grow anything anymore. The chives. The fennel. In the end. Couldn’t eat much of anything either.”
“I know,” Marla says.
Marla puts the dybbuk on the counter and opens the refrigerator. No one has touched her egg salad, but the constellation of herbs still shines up from under the plastic wrap, green and good.
She removes the salad from the fridge, peels the plastic wrap from the top of the bowl, balls it up, throws it away. Marla lays a hand on the dybbuk, feels its cool, shivering skin.
She picks it up.
“Louie liked it with Miracle Whip,” Dory says.
Marla says nothing.
Gently, like the pizza guy down on the corner, she stretches the edges of the dybbuk. She lays it across the top of the salad bowl, sticky side down.
It clings.
Then it sags in the middle, just a little, just enough to touch what’s beneath. There is no eating for Louie, not anymore, but there’s this, and I will not pretend to know whether any of it, in the end, did the poor bastard any good.
Dory can’t help it. She chuckles. Then goes into her room and pops two Ambien.
Marla rummages around in a corner and finds her tote bag. She lowers the bowl inside.
Tomorrow will be day three of the shiva. Marla will be gone this time.
And so, if Larry and Bekah bother to look, will be the egg salad.
Author’s Note: I may have had a dream about a pancake with teeth, or a ghost that was shaped like a pancake. I think it was the latter, because I remember being stricken by how completely pathetic the thing looked, and thinking poor bastard. What if this is as good as it gets?
Hamm’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope and more. Hamm lives in Los Angeles and writes under the protective blankie of a pseudonym.
Content note (click for details)Content note: parental loss, wounds, face scars
When the mediums arrive, I don’t notice their scars. It’s their machine that grabs my attention, all pointed glass bulbs, copper wires, and metal rods. Like a four-foot square vacuum tube radio. I rub the belt buckle hidden in my tunic pocket as the six women in gray robes lug the machine up my gravel driveway.
They approach the house frame I’ve erected, set up where Dad’s old house once stood. They place the machine on a slate slab I’ve set up by what I hope will be the front door. I uncap my electrical source as one of the mediums puts on ceramic-weave gloves to connect to the leads. I tamp down a flare of worry, reminding myself that I’d just recharged the lead-acid battery at the solar station and redid its plant latex cover a few days ago.
After the machine is humming, the women look directly at me, and my stomach drops. All of them have scars around their eyes. One has deep pink lines through her crow’s feet into her temples; one has swirls like the silt in a riverbed along her cheekbones.
A voice breaks into my reverie. “— even if the séance works, Rory, your father might not want to save your house,” the medium in front says. “The dead are in a restful place, and some don’t want to leave.”
I’ve blanked out again. I debate asking her to repeat herself, but I know the pros and cons. Entity houses are part of my job.
***
The Housing Authority was a thick stone building that squatted like a pale pig rooting in the rubble of less fortunate buildings. It was once a bank, but when everything fell apart, it was pressed into more important service.
The line on the ramp outside was always long. Folks would file in politely after I unlocked the door, reveling in the cool air while I climbed into the booth at the center of the marble atrium and raised the window grate.
“Welcome to the Unica Housing Authority. I’m Rory and I’ll be helping you today.” The crowd quieted as my voice echoed over their heads. “Please remember there are no perfect living situations anymore and we might not have a spot that suits you, but we’ll try our best. When you approach the window, please only share conditions for which you have a high tolerance. Our tallied conditions are listed on the wall to your right.”
I pointed at the metal plaque with its etched and braille contents. ‘Cold’, ‘hot’, ‘dust’, ‘mold’, and many others: too long to read aloud. I couldn’t help taking a second glance at an item partway down: “ancestors”. I tapped at the screen of my glass computer with a magnetic stylus.
“Okay, who’s first?”
The person who strode up to the counter wore a sky blue dress and a long black leather-looking jacket, both spattered with crusty yellow leopard-pattern splotches. I suppressed a wince. It’d been a decade since the bug killed anyone, but it still hurt to look at. I forced a smile.
“Hi there! Tolerances?”
“Dark, cold, and noisy,” the person replied.
I entered the tags and the computer returned two options. “Great. There’s a steel warehouse on Parker and a stone mill house at the end of Chancel. Neither slot includes bedding.”
The person nodded perfunctorily. “The mill house is good.”
I tapped the screen to mark the slot as ‘taken’, then grabbed a slate marker and scratched the address on it with a metal stylus. I slid the marker under the window. “There you go. Thank you and good luck.”
I watched as the person walked away, the crowd pulling away from them like oil from a soap drop. The leopard spot on the jacket’s left shoulder had already spread. A sign of plastic clothing. I wondered where they’d come from, what kind of privilege they had, to still own any wearable vinyl.
***
My memory has never been great. I forget my own age sometimes. But one thing I do remember is the first time I saw those creepy yellow splotches.
I had a dinner date with Dad, but his monthly doctor’s appointment was running late. I decided to hang out outside the house, swaying in the worn swing from my childhood. The rope was frayed against my palm and had worn grooves in the branch, but it was a comfortable seat. As I pushed myself in a lazy circle, the late afternoon sun speckled the leaves and I saw the spots: phlegm-yellow and tissue-thin inside, gray ring outside.
My phone rang as I was examining one of the mottled leaves.
“It’s your father.” The nurse’s voice didn’t even shake. “He collapsed during his checkup and now he’s unresponsive.”
‘Unresponsive’. What a horrible word.
***
I fell into my job at the Housing Authority because Dad’s house was one of the first hit in our town. We’d figured out how to detect and treat the first wave of the fungus we now call “the bug.” But it mutated fast, and the most resistant strain fed on our buildings instead of living beings. It ate away siding and air conditioning and window casings. Alcohol sprays, systemics, antimicrobials, and antifungals all failed, so I stopped at Town Hall to get the plans filed for Dad’s house. To see how bad it was going to get.
“We need to warn people to the south,” the woman at the desk blurted while I was making copies. “I think they’ll believe it more from people with personal experience. You have a nice voice. Want a job?”
I thought about Dad’s bay window falling out of its dissolving casing. How the siding looked like Swiss cheese a year after I’d buried him. My throat tightened and I nodded.
I’d only been working there for a month when I first heard about an entity house.
“Hi, I’m calling to tell you about the bug that is destroying homes,” I read from the script.
“Oh no, dear, I’ll be fine,” the person replied, with a breathless giggle.
“My apologies!” I looked at their house plans. “We have on record that your house has wood beams and studs.”
“That’s right?”
“If your house has any wood, plastic, vinyl, or acrylic, the bug will attack it,” I said. “I can describe–”
“It’s okay, dear,” they interrupted. “Gramma took care of it.”
My heart leapt. Maybe there’s a solution. “What did your grandmother do?”
“She came back.” They giggled again. “Oh, she’s asking for her show. Gotta go.”
My phone clicked. They’d hung up.
Last I checked, the house was still standing, no leopard-spot marks in sight. They’ve also been generous. Filed four sleep slots with us. Tenants report that Gramma is noisy at 2 AM and is particular about kitchen cleanliness, to the point where she’ll wake them up with a frigid touch if they leave a mess. Otherwise, she doesn’t act like a ghost at all.
We’ve confirmed twelve entity houses so far. We’ve also heard other stories – folks who summoned a family member to help, only to have their relative’s ghost refuse and go back where they came from. It sounded like it hurt, to lose them all over again.
***
The head medium bows at me. “Do you have the ashes?”
I slide the silver urn from behind the new door jamb. I hold my breath as I break the seal on the urn and grab a pinch of ashes.
She points at the urn. “That should come as well.”
“Really?” I debate whether to return the ashes.
“He will be the fourth for the séance.”
“Oh.” I cradle the urn in my left arm. “Where should I put…”
I can’t bring myself to say ‘him’ or ‘it’.
The head medium gestures. “There, towards the west. The departed sit at the setting sun. You sit at the north, our guiding star.”
I place the urn where she indicated. Up close the machine purrs like a satisfied feline.
“Kasira, you sit at the east, the rising, and…” She cocks her head, as if listening. “Yes, Erius, you take the south, the brightening.”
The mediums, both young-looking and oddly aged, seat themselves. Kasira’s scars are jagged scores like broken toffee in the hollows of her eyes. Erius bears four white-silver furrows, two down each cheek.
“We do not control those we call,” the medium says. “Ancestors speak to us only if they wish to. We take these ashes to communicate that we are your approved emissary to the dead.”
I sprinkle the pinch of ashes into Kasira’s cupped hand. She presses a thumb into them and strokes her thumb across her forehead. She passes the ashes to Erius, who repeats the gesture, then shakes the remaining ashes into a metal cup at the center of the machine. They both grasp one of the metal dowels on the lachrymatorium with their left hand. The rest of the women back down the driveway.
“Where are they going?” I whisper to Kasira.
“This is no longer their place.” She winks, her broken-toffee scars bunching. “Now it’s up to us.”
***
“Okay, who’s next?”
The person wore an algae tunic and mycelium-leather clogs, their black hair short-cropped, small brown eyes glaring at me.
“Thank you for waiting. Tolerances?”
“Pollen,” they replied.
“Nothing else?”
“Why?” They sneered. “Where do you live?”
I hid a sigh. “My tolerances are dark, stuffy, and hard, so I’m in a shipping container park. I share my crate with three others.” Their brow furrowed, so I modulated my voice towards the perky. “My bedding is a myco mat. If you’re interested, there are slots left in my park.”
They deflated, the sneer replaced by a disappointed twist of lips. “I see. I’d be okay with bugs, steps, and height.”
“Fantastic!” I tapped it in. “Two treehouses have slots available. They have woven live-branch floors, leaf beds, and mycelium tarps in case of rain. One has a sunset view and one has a living vine wall to block wind from the south. It includes morning glories.”
Their eyes widened and I caught a glimpse of a grin. “Ooh, a vine wall! I’ll take that one.”
I smiled as I passed over the slate marker. It was rare to please someone in this job. I rubbed the belt buckle in my pocket and reminded myself to mark this moment down later.
***
Kate usually let me stay past closing to use the glass computer in the back office. I’d jot down things we’ve lost. Sometimes simple pleasures, like books and stuffed animals. Sometimes things I’ve never used, like Kevlar and mosquito netting. Sometimes I’d even mark down people who I’d briefly forgotten.
Memory has always been a problem for me. Doctors had differing theories why. Maybe the trauma of losing my mom so early;. Possibly an attention disorder. All I knew was that I’d never been good with names or dates. But it wasn’t until Dad was gone that I realized how much I was forgetting.
When I arrived at the hospital, he was already dead. They gave me a bag of his things. Plaid shirt, canvas pants, steel watch, leather belt. A few weeks after he died, the leather belt grew a tiny leopard spot. I’d given the belt to Dad for Father’s Day. I realized I didn’t remember buying it, I didn’t remember him opening it, but I remembered him putting it on. I couldn’t remember the sound of his voice, but I remembered what he said: “It fits! How did you know my belt size, Roribell?”
“I didn’t, Dad.” I held out my arms in an ellipse. “This is how big you are when I hug you. So that’s how big the belt needed to be.”
I remembered his eyes filling with tears. He’d kissed the top of my head as I hugged him again, feeling his stomach hitching in quiet sobs.
“I keep forgetting how short you are,” he’d whispered, making me laugh.
“And how long your legs are,” I’d teased.
We stayed in the hug for ten minutes.
I thought. I didn’t know for sure.
I did remember screaming over the leather as the bug ate it, that memory turning to shreds, then dust. I also remembered crying with relief when the gold-toned brass buckle remained intact, and how well it fit in my pocket.
***
Kasira leans towards me. “Remind us how to say your father’s name?”
“Niven, like given, and Seinn like sine wave.”
The ash-prints on the mediums’ foreheads glow with a blue-gray iridescence as the machine sparks and Erius speaks.
“I call upon the spirit of Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”
A breeze kicks up.
Kasira repeats it. “I call upon Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”
Nothing happens. Kasira glances at Erius.
“You feel anything?”
“Not enough juice,” Erius replies.
I shrink under their gaze.
***
“Thank you for waiting. Tolerances?”
“Ancestors,” the frail person at the window replied. Their watery eyes were swollen and the ridges of their nostrils were chapped. The bones of old leaves peeked out from under their lank brown hair.
I raised my eyebrows. “Ancestors? Nothing else?”
Their gaze didn’t waver.
“Look.” I lowered my voice. “There aren’t many real entity houses right now. It takes a family loss and a very generous ancestor to make one. People claim they have a haunting, but the bug always gets them. You should choose something else.”
The person shook their head. “I’m allergic to a thousand things. It’s too cold for me in here and too hot out there. Anything hard, bright, or noisy hurts. Right now I’m in a sleep ditch off the freeway because it’s better than anything else.” They shrugged. “So unless you have a tolerance I haven’t heard of yet, ‘ancestors’ is it.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I can add you to the waiting list but it’s fairly long.”
They pulled a square aluminum pager from their pocket. I scanned it and added the ID to the list, and they turned away from the booth, shoulders slumped.
I thought about the thing I was building, and I crossed my fingers and bumped their ID to the top before calling the next person up.
***
After Mom died, Dad took me along to his construction sites, first showing me how to sort tools, then how to lay bricks, then on to more complicated things. Everything he’d taught me was clear in my mind, even after everything else I’d forgotten.
When I started the house frame, I decided to take as many shortcuts as I could. No walls, no planing. The bug took months to hit new-cut wood, so I had some time, but not much. If the séance worked, the house would stand. If the séance didn’t work, it would fall anyway.
The doorway was last. Dad was always good with doors. I sawed the branch off the maple where my swing had once hung. The living branch still had grooves in it from the rope so I was extra cautious cutting it, preserving those grooves.
I sobbed while taking the bark off the branch. Wept like I was sacrificing one of the few memories I still had.
I was still working on it, sanding the jamb and hammering in the nail where the bell would go, when the mediums arrived.
***
Kasira reaches out to me. I hesitate, glancing at the machine.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she promises.
I slide my fingers into her hand, surprised at its warmth. Kasira squeezes my palm.
“Why have you asked us here today?”
“I want a better place to live,” I murmur. “I’m tired of my container.”
Erius shakes her head. “You could have built a steel structure.”
Kasira clasps my hand more tightly. “Why wood? Why here?”
A muscle in the side of my throat tightens, sending a sharp ache down into my collarbone. “I miss my dad. He was a woodworker. He built the house that used to be here, but the bug ate it.”
Erius scoots towards me. “But why did you choose something so fragile?”
“For… for memory.”
“Memory?” Kasira tilts her head. “Can you tell us more about that?”
I try not to sniffle. “The bug took all the furniture he built. It took everything he built. Those were supposed to be heirlooms. Now it’s all gone, so it’s like he’s all gone.”
“Why would he be gone? Doesn’t he live in your memories?” Kasira rubs her thumb over my knuckle. “Doesn’t everyone you’ve loved?”
I struggle to breathe. They’re watching me expectantly. Waiting for me to agree. I glance back at the doorway. Something clenches painfully inside my chest, and I can’t hold it anymore.
“No, that’s the problem!” Tears scald my cheeks like steam. “I should remember more, but I don’t. I don’t remember him on my sixteenth birthday. I don’t remember him at my college graduation. I don’t remember our last Christmas.” My throat spasms. “Oh god, and it’s too late! It’s too late to make any more memories with him! If I was smart, I would have written everything down. I would have made sure I’d never forget. But I’m not smart, I’m a selfish jerk, I’m a terrible daughter. I thought I had more time. I thought I had more time.”
I try to pull free from Kasira to cover my face as I cry, but she holds fast, a deathly stillness in her fingers. “There it is,” she whispers. “There’s the juice. That’s the grief he needs.”
The machine’s hum intensifies, vibrating in my skin. Electricity spits as the bulbs turn on. I squint, my tears cracking the world into rainbows, as Kasira and Erius chant together.
“We call upon the spirit of Niven Seinn to grace us with your voice!”
A white mist coagulates above the machine. The mediums continue. “Your daughter Rorius awaits you, Niven. If you consent, make yourself known!”
Something sizzles. I smell peanut butter and pepper – right, Dad’s lunches, on that wheat bread he loved. I’d forgotten them.
Then I hear a voice.
Roribell…
My stomach jumps. It’s been years, but I recognize it. Even though I couldn’t recall the sound of his voice, I recognize the sound.
I recognize it.
The smell. The sound. The memories were always there, deep in my gut. Exactly like the belt. Knowing his size not because it was in my brain, but because I’d hugged him so often my body knew it by heart.
Whatever my brain did or didn’t keep, the rest of my body recorded it all.
My shoulders wrench with sobs of relief as Kasira squeezes my hand. “Niven Seinn, will you share your afterlife on this plane, within the house your child has built, until such time as she departs?”
Do you need me, Roribell?
“I…” I stop. Am I being a terrible daughter again? Is it cruel to want him to stay with me? To leave the peaceful rest he deserves?
I flash on the person with the watery eyes. Their desperation. And how many other people might be in the same place.
I might not need him, but other people do.
“We all do. Please,” I manage, vocal cords tight with choked-back grief.
Then I’ll stay…
Kasira and Erius shriek as lightning crackles around the machine, then leaps into the lintel of the door with a sound like fireworks. Kasira clenches my hand hard enough to crack my knuckles before she lets go.
“Bless you, Niven, for your sacrifice. When Rory departs, one of us shall return to release you,” Erius gasps.
The machine’s hum fades. A wisp of smoke rises from Kasira’s face, a trickle of bloody pus seeping from a broken spot under her left eye.
“Shit!” I reach towards her. “Are you okay?”
She pats my hand, then blots the pus on her cheek with a graceful lift of her shoulder. “It hurts, but scars are remembrance.” She smiles. “Most people hide their scars, but for us, it’s an honor to bear this memory.”
As she and Erius undo the leads, Kasira winks at me and pantomimes crying. I rub my eyes by instinct, then jump at a sting under my right eye. A smear of blood pinkens the side of my index finger.
A wound, to turn into a scar. For remembrance.
I grin despite myself. Of course. Scars are the ghosts of past injuries, haunting our skin. It would keep my memory close to the surface, so that I’ll never forget.
I don’t know what my scar will look like, but I don’t care. It’ll remind me, every day, whether from other people’s reactions or from seeing my face in a reflection, that my memories live within me.
That my dad was never gone.
I lean on the maple door jamb and watch them gather up the machine and leave, their robes fading into the air as twilight deepens.
I like your house, Roribell.
I sigh. “Thank you, Daddy.”
I hug the jamb for at least ten minutes, then pluck the belt buckle from my pocket. I hang it on the nail that marks where the bell will go, and step under the lightning-struck lintel to start the walls.
Author’s Note: This story came to me when I was processing several different kinds of loss at once. I’d gone to a memorial during the second year of the pandemic and as people recounted stories about the deceased, I realized that not only had I lost the person’s presence, I’d lost memories of them too. That memorial, plus the loss of access to the world around me, led me to an internal quest that I externalized to create Rory’s. (Many thanks to Cat Rambo for the title.)
Risa Wolf is a multi-gendered water elemental disguised as an ink-stained lycanthrope. (Don’t tell their spouse or their dogs; the disguise is working.) They come from the Burned-Over District in New York State, and they imagine houses for book-ghosts for a living. Their writing can be found in places like Apex, Clarkesworld, and Cast of Wonders. Visit them at killerpuppytails.com, on Mastodon at @killerpuppytails, or BlueSky at @risawolf.bsky.social.
Someone began sending hand-written spellcrafted postcards out of DC in July of 2024. Those postcards made the rounds for a good nine months, under the radar, scarcely observed. That was, until the rash of good health, the proliferation of wealth, and the sudden uptick in good living coupled with a grand downtick in big socioeconomic issues the mayor was quick to claim as her own—such as suicides and unemployment—brought the situation to the attention of the East US Coven.
Because we can’t have downticks in unemployment and upticks in good health, not if there’s witchery being waved under everyone’s noses. Especially if the handwriting has a particularly feminine flair. No siree.
The coven sent a team, sans me, to check DC, do a sweep that chugged them around on and off the metro until they shook their heads and scattered home, reports saying that it must be the mayor after all.
I admit, I checked the coven’s files after, a part of me rankling since the coven overlooked asking me to look into things when I was right there. But I am “just a low-level research drone.” As if my duties take away from knowing my own home over men from New York and Boston; as if it isn’t literally my job to find possible unapproved spell-usage hinted at in news articles and reports and forum threads. Talk about being low gal on the invisible corporate witchpole I’m supposed to climb.
Then the goodwill witching spread. Not like California wildfires. Like ladybugs. Crawling into people’s houses via their mailboxes, with goodness hidden under their stamps and well-wishes printed out every fourth letter in the mundane notes.
Now, I’m what you call a witchery watcher, or at least that’s what would be on my resume if Salem hadn’t happened, kicking us all deep undercover from the rest of the world. It’s not that glamorous a job, not when half the self-proclaimed witches can’t seal their bottle spells properly enough to be termed spells and the other half spend the bulk of their time insisting that spells are all internal or some new-agey form of mindfulness. But here and there someone who acts suspiciously like a real witch pops up on one of my routine checks and my job gets a tad more interesting, if you call “interesting” sitting at home while higher-ups from elsewhere snatch the file and head out into the field to hunt that wild witch down themselves.
Those days are frustrating as all heck because I’m never given authorization to use higher-level spellcraft to check out the witch dabbler myself.
See, it’s dangerous to authorize women for too much crafting on the job. Don’t want another Salem. Don’t want another witch-burning spree where the men of the covens hide behind the women, send them out to die for the good of keeping everyone else safe.
Best to make sure we don’t get noticed.
A bit of a catch-22 if you ask me, since promotions come from wild witch catching, yet if I’m never out in the field because of my supposed feminine wiles…
That mentality isn’t something I can change all at once, not craning my head as I am from the bottom of the coven.
So when I get a postcard in my mail that smells like the sage-flavored mountain on its front and spells a wealth of confidence into my spine, I decide to do some off-grid, inadvisable digging of my own. Maybe jump a few pegs up on that ladder even if I have to bend some coven rules. Get to a position where I might do some good, change the culture, move some immovable mountains so my two girls could step into a coven without having to claw for every scrap of respect they gained.
Or I hope I’d at least earn a nice letter of recommendation and some off the record shop-chat that could help me corporate-jump myself between the ladders of different covens like a game of leapfrog.
I wait till both my girls skip merrily onto bus #475, that orange monstrosity that every day I wish I could wrap in a protective blanket of spells, though that doesn’t come under the “allowable spellcraft” rules.
While the girls learn mathematics and grammar and spotty history, I craft a runic graph of my city, marking it up by feel before I rip up that confidence-spelled postcard, hold the confetti in my fist and release it over the scrawled lines representing DC. A spelled wind takes those jagged-edged pieces and swirls them over the city on my coffee table, each of them bobbing when they sailed down the Potomac, yet ultimately landing in as haphazard a way as you’d like.
I try pendulums next, cleansing each and working through the now-shredded postcard’s origins, but the crystals latch onto the stamp, dragging the pendulum toward my local post office over and over like a poor confused dog. Which meant whoever this witch is had found a way to break the trail, stop the ink, the words, the spellcraft, from trickling a wake back, back to the one who’d crafted them.
Screw it. I’ll bend the law just a tad. No holds barred.
Using sunwater to find pinprick jolts of lingering spellcraft wake where it hadn’t yet been contaminated with too much other life, I find the houses in the local neighborhoods that had been sent spellcrafted postcards recently. Reach my hand in through grandmother’s opal-glazed bowl and steal mail right off of tables and armchairs and dusty tops of refrigerators.
In a stack that thick and robust, the slightly damp postcards practically glow with a lovely residual witch-touch—a gentle turquoise with pale pink chevrons that spoke of streams of love and caring in a backdrop of creativity and friendship. My single, now-shredded card wasn’t this bright alone—just a drop in the metaphorical postal system it’d been. Whoever this witch is, they truly are a spellcrafting benefactor of tiny, prolific blessings. Blessings that are collectively wrapping their embrace around the city, stretching through Arlington, through Bethesda, reaching for Rockville and Columbia.
Like some urban, limited-word guardian angel.
I hesitate, running my fingers along those damp edges, staring at the smudged ink where every fourth letter spelled contentment, spelled hope, spelled happiness, motivation, forgiveness, love, charity, satisfaction. There is even one spelled to help find lost things. And another to accept those things that can’t be found.
This witch doesn’t need to be hunted down like some Salem echo. This witch is doing good work, witch work, the sort that means to help, to heal, to wrap warm arms about a cold people and remind them that life wasn’t the crapshoot it sometimes felt like, filled with people who only did wrong to others.
I sit with hands clasped, suffused with a sense of rightness. I would tuck these postcards away, ignore the proliferation of positivity, let this witch, whoever they are, get away with their practice under the coven’s nose because people like them are what these cities need, whether or not its citizens cared. Whether or not its citizens might run screaming if they knew.
And for a good thirty minutes, I admire my own morality. Then my girls come home with a squeal of bus brakes and a breath of chilly wind.
My youngest screams in, a ten-year-old’s strength and optimism and excitement opening up a babbling of her day, her wild curls haloing her face and the crookedness of her teeth making her smile seem wide, wider. Like the world hadn’t yet caught hold of her mind, told her to hush, hush, let the others talk.
But my oldest steps through the door a minute after, dragging her sneakers and dropping her bookbag like it weighed more than a curse, societal expectations bricking her up, squishing her down. Her dark hair wafts around her cheeks. Her eyes skip past mine. What has happened today, what words lost to the depths of her throat, what tiny infractions that seem so large to her now, yet will climb and build until she presumes them normal?
Until she finds herself working in an entry-level job under people with less skill, less craft than what she possesses in her littlest finger, yet will be unable to leap past them because rules and regs and laws all built to say no, not-yet, you-aren’t-the-right-fit have become expected. Lines she’ll sit contentedly in, obediently.
Like the box toddlers play in. Yet as a toddler, we always push against the cardboard and tip…over. Because the box is fragile, always was, until we let it turn to stone and plaster and brick around us as we grow.
I put the girls back on the bus the next morning, the grey sky cleared in splotches, like hope peeking out from a shedding blanket, though someone probably has a damn good darning needle and some thick thread and will patch those little spots up, clouds yanked in stitches until the holes shrink to nothingness.
But I can’t think like that.
I’ve got spells in my back pocket. A little bottle, filled with postcard confetti and scrying water and intentions, all sealed with a black wax meant to enhance and reflect the witch-touch so the spell might be powerful enough to react to wakes and fresher castings. A small notebook page, folded and folded and folded again until I’ve got a puzzle with protective words written in sixteen different languages, fifteen of which I don’t speak, that will make me hard to remember. A watch from my childhood—yellow bumblebees on its scratched band—that saves up seconds, seven of them to be exact, that I might replay them in need.
I head to my local post office to begin my chase of the witch’s wake, the air thick about me, expectant. The bottle spell for finding things that don’t want to be found grows invisible tendrils about my body, reaching for hints to scarf down, swallow and exaggerate so that I might trail. A good little nose, I’d once been called by some middle management guy from Baltimore. No better than a dog—stick me in a kennel when I’m not needed, why don’t you.
I shook my head, removing that conglomerate, insidious voice that attempted to shunt me down the ladder. Climbed the steps into the brick building, the scent of paper thickening, the scent of spellcraft billowing.
Little metal boxes with their little metal locks block me in on all sides. A witch might have a day in here, snapping up the power numbers, every box that ends in seven, every thirteen that winks with untapped potential, every three growing warm at my presence. I let my finding spell reach and search, sifting through the air, tasting it with suckers no one else can see.
All that billowing spellcraft, streams of wakes where postcards have swept up and away and into and out of postal boxes congregates here, then parts there, disappears here, then solidifies there. In flux, throbbing, like…the craft is being constantly worked in pockets and moments, nothing too big all at once, but everything small all the time.
I step up toward the counter. And pause.
Of course. There she is. Not quite as powerful a witch as I thought, her wake stopping here because here is where she crafts.
She reminds me of my own mother, the way her poinsettia-patterned dress clings to her, the way her thick glasses sit on the bridge of her nose, the way she chats with the man in front of me, telling him all about grandchildren, all about life. As she passes him the receipt she tells him not to save his smiles because like cookies, they go bad if you don’t pass them out. Can’t save them all for oneself, you can’t, she says.
For just a moment, I see all that effort she’s gone through, handwriting each message, licking every stamp, pressing her witch-touch as she casts the small spells with a hope in her heart that they make someone smile, or give them the little bounce they need to make a fresh choice or be content with an old one.
The man brushes past me with a light in his dark eyes, like there’s a chevron pink flame flickering in those depths.
Then I’m breathing hard.
I think—I thought this would be easier. My fingers slick with sweat as I tug off my glove, press the contact list, find my coven boss’s number. I think—I thought I’d had resolve. I’m just doing what’s necessary to claw my way up that witchpole, lay claim to little scraps of power that I’m thrown. That’s all.
That’s all.
My phone comes down, down to my side. She smiles at me, handing out joy like a freshly-baked cookie, like she can’t see the finding spell eagerly wrapping about her, pointing as if I hadn’t already figured her out. Realization flickers in her eyes and that smile flattens out.
I could hold my hand out, introduce myself, wish her well on her crusade. I could find a kindred spirit maybe, that reflects back on the days I sat with my mother while she taught me runes and wax and scrying.
Instead, I reach to my back pocket and rewind seven seconds, take back her smile, take back the man brushing past me. Back, back, to when my folded paper spell still worked to make me forgettable.
Then, as the man begins to turn away anew, I turn as well, escape out into the street, away from the little metal boxes and all the postcards they may or may not hide.
There, with the patched-up grey sky thickening overhead, I make the call. My breathing steady. My heartrate normal. Because sometimes we have to do things we don’t like, yeah, things that jump us up that witchpole.
That’s what I tell myself, over and over, as I walk home to meet the girls off the bus. That’s what I tell them when we sit around the table. Tell them that sometimes, in order to keep our jobs, keep ourselves safe, keep food on the table and inch the world into something different, something that might be better, we’ve got to work within the confines of the rules we were born into. Inside the box.
I just don’t tell them how much it costs.
When my coven comes—two men from New York and a third from Atlanta—I try not to think of the woman like my mother. Try to think about her like she’s an unknowing martyr, a witch for the cause so that the covens stand tall, that I might wind my way up to wield true power, make a difference one day. It’s a long game. Long.
Like how they thought of Salem. All those woman pulled and burned that the covens might stand…
I’m on the email chain as they wrap up the “DC Postcard Witch.” There’s no mention of the higher school grades or the lower unemployment those postcards had wrought. There’s just a withering in the air, the sky crying for a week as the postcards are fading, fading, gone.
And I…
I take my tiny back pat. My off-brandvacuum-cleaner reward. My paper commendation that crinkles in my desk at home, buried under my daughters’ honor roll cardstock print-outs.
I go back to my researching duties, reading, filing, emailing, typing Johns and Steves and Adams in the “To” boxes. I find evidence of possible witchery occurring outside of the Coven’s know-how and approval. I field question after question on how a spell works, what they might be doing wrong from people who work in positions higher than me and should already know. I fix, I tweak, I make everyone above me look good, because that’s what they say will make me look good too.
Except it doesn’t. Nothing changes. That witchpole looks the same from down here. And my city, it looks all the worse.
The upticks become downticks and the downticks morph into upticks. My youngest begins to have a smidge of that same sagging weight to her steps as my oldest. The dinner table talks become rote, become painful because I can’t believe in the shit I’m spitting out anymore.
So I stop saying anything at all.
And I start doing.
Someone begins to send spellcraft postcards from DC in September 2025, during the season the ladybugs start searching for warmth, encroaching into homes, red specks crawling pentagrams across ceilings, insect runecraft, the sort the big covens would shut down the moment they sniffed competition. Because that’s all this has ever been about, stomping the competition before women might claw their way back, swell their small-coven ranks, show the world that witchery wasn’t about profits and rules and big power, but about small powers, about hopes and futures outside of confinements.
They’ll come for me too one of these days.
Maybe the winter of 2027, when the cold that creaks through ragged carpet is defrosted by a few tropical words spelled out every 4th letter. Maybe during the height of the summer in 2028, when the breeze contained under flag stamps is a little more inclusive as it breathes soothing messages through the worst of the season. Maybe not until 2035, when I’m finally eligible to apply for a managerial position in the coven–fifteen years of dedicated service and all–when they tune their eyes closer, check every nook and cranny of my life, overturn the rocks and stamps to find the gentle spells I’d released en masse to those in most need.
And then maybe my girls will nod a few decades on, saying their mother did something, yeah. Something that made a difference. Something that maybe would spread like ladybugs, happy bright spots, little, little, but proliferating nonetheless.
Marie Croke is an award-winning fantasy and science-fiction writer living in Maryland with her family, all of whom like to scribble messages in her notebooks when she’s not looking. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and her stories can be found in over a dozen magazines, including Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Zooscape, Cast of Wonders, Diabolical Plots, and Fireside. She has worked as a slush editor and first reader for multiple magazines, including khōréō and Dark Matter, and her reviews can be found in Apex Magazine. Her hobbies include crochet, birding, and aerial dance.
Don’t you understand? I only ever wanted to make you proud.
***
This is dawn: fields shading from black to grey, flicker-fading starlight, our voices raised against the wind and the red scarves whipping our faces. Our song levitates us ten feet in the air, above dirt roads packed down by wagon wheels and chariots: Carl Lang’s Canter, an ode to unseen horses and sunrise and longing. When we sing—as long as we sing—our feet do not touch the ground.
The town in which we finally stumble back to earth is a tiny nest of weathered homesteads: cows collared with slow-tolling bells, a rooster’s crow, the smoke of yesterday’s fires a thin scrape against the air. A wooden pole stands in the main square, dark with carvings—poems, its makers would claim, never songs. I have seen dozens like it, windblown as excuses.
We surround the faded house to which Maestro has directed me, shivering against the wind. The sky teeters on the brink of rose and indigo; in the rising light, our robes glow like ghosts.
“For the Great Sound.”
I raise my gloved hands against the cold. Seven pairs of eyes meet mine—an octet, two singers for each voice part. Each of us newly minted lieutenants, eager to prove to the Empire our worth.
“For the Great Sound,” they murmur in turn, and adrenaline arches through my body.
I was born for this. Have trained all eighteen years of my life for this.
I sing our starting notes—a high clear D minor triad, no pitch pipes, not with us—and our voices call down fire.
***
This town. One of the Emperor’s spies heard a violin, its sweet unmistakable lilt escaping through the crack in a window, laughter muffled but not silenced by cold stone walls. The instrument itself is not strictly outlawed—only voices bend the earth, the air—but where there is a tune, there are songs, and where there are songs—
Foolish, these people. It has been a hundred years. They should have known.
***
We learn four songs for fire, one for every two years we spend in the Conservatory.
Ember, to warm.
Spark, to illuminate.
Flare, to signal.
Inferno, to destroy.
We discover, today, that the Inferno blazes red as the brightening sky.
I discover, today, that I can hear the violinist’s screams as she burns, even through her walls.
***
We touch down before the Conservatory wall as blush-streaked clouds pearl to white, our robes still dusted with ash. We could sing them clean, of course, and we do, for performances. But this is different: this is the blood streaked on the sheets of a first wedding night, this is the battle scar lanced across a once-soft hand, this is our only trophy when traitor and house have burned to ground.
“I hate when we hear them.” The second tenor—Cas. He leans into his roommate as we pass beneath the Conservatory’s marble watchtowers; the fog of their exhales curl into a single creature.
“Why?” I ask, and the two of them stiffen in tandem, feet lifting a beat too long. “The town is better off now than it was before.”
“You’re Hanwa,” the roommate tries—eyes lingering too long on my black hair, my olive-toned skin—and shrivels under my glare.
“The Empire honors all who serve it.” I stride back to barracks ahead of them, my red scarf flashing behind me, and hum the first few phrases of Inferno—my part only, and therefore harmless—over and over.
***
I wonder if you blame yourself.
I wonder if you think that first piano a mistake: the chipped ivory greyed with sweat and age, the wooden contraptions you strapped around my feet so that, at age four, I could work the pedals but not walk away from the bench. I wonder if you regretted sending me to the church elder who twisted my ears, or the sawdust-grubbed coins you slipped into his pockets as I pounded my fists on the piano bench and screamed.
I will not blame you. There is no fault to be found in a dark man in a pale empire, who only wanted the best for his daughter.
But what did you expect, stranger in a strange land? What did you think would happen?
When the soldiers came, whose song did you think I would sing?
***
“Bravo, Vitka,” Maestro tells me, one hand on my shoulder. Our steps echo off fluted columns, the wide marble hallway with its blue pools of floored sunlight, and my breath catches again—the Darbaum Conservatory, and I am inside, eye to eye with its commanding officer, addressed by the Imperial name I chose. “Cas tells me the house was but a smudge of ash by the time you were done.”
At least that boy gave credit where credit was due. “Yes, sir.”
We walk shoulder to shoulder through the mahogany double doors, thrown open to fresh winter air, then down the sweeping staircase. Maestro’s epaulets glint red and gold—four stripes like a future.
“There is talk,” he says, “of your company touring this season.”
A second dawn blooms in my chest. “Is there?”
He looks at me sideways. “I’m only telling you what I’ve heard.”
Darbaum has twenty companies of fully trained Kor, nearly two hundred voices. Ours is one of the smaller ones, but we never needed to be many, only the best. I would know—I chose them myself. I incline my head. “We would not be worthy of such an honor.”
At the base of the staircase, we pause. An old man stoops beside the adjoining road, robed in brown. A stranger, not a soldier, whom the guards have somehow allowed through.
When he looks up, his eyes widen, and he calls me by my Hanwa name.
***
No.
That man is not you. That man—bony-shouldered, twig-thin arms, white wisps of hair strewn over balding shine—cannot be you.
“You,” he says, his outstretched finger trembling, and I sing of crushed lungs and fleeing air until he sinks to his knees.
***
I do not kill him.
I do not kill him, because the Empire has not yet decreed it, because it is not my place to decide whether he is deserving of life or death.
I only let him fall, and as a couple second-years drag him away, grey robes fluttering, I watch Maestro’s eyes crinkle into a smile.
The stranger dies later, in the infirmary, fists clutched to his heart.
***
Again, you said, your breath heavy on the back of my neck.
Again.
Again.
There were never any blisters on my fingers—only an ache in my wrists and elbows, fear charring ash on the back of my tongue. I always got it right ten repetitions too late: ten lashes, two more hours stiffening on the cold bench, wincing every time I didn’t reach high enough.
Again, you said, and I watched a tear slip silver between the keys, burning a new vein like weakness. And I think, now, that you had no song but this: the shout and the lash, your arm weighted with all the lives you never lived; your insistence, in this country where you were suddenly nothing, that I live them all instead.
***
Crimson curtains rise on a mahogany-paneled amphitheater, a sea of silent faces. The Empire does not like to loose its hold over political prisoners, even after the labor camps; our people are too weak to handle the truth of governing, and rebellions may spark at a few overwrought stories.
And so: this room, velvet-swathed and trimmed with gilt, the prisoners’ wrists bound to their chairs and lined up like an offering. Pink trails leaking out of their mouths, from tongues excised by sixth-years in grey.
I raise my arms, hum an A and then D-sharp: the devil’s interval.
Song of Dissolution is dangerous even in pieces—we have only ever rehearsed in twos or threes, lest the world begin to twist—but in its fullness, every part will slip between three others at a time, echoing, amplifying, modulating. Accidentals will fall like stones in a stream—ripple through the main thread until the entire melody shifts, pulsing and perfect, and dissolves every living thing within its parameters to sand.
No one ever leaves this song alive—sometimes, if they’re not careful, even its singers.
Cas’s gaze meets mine. Behind him, another five hundred glares, heavy with apprehension. My palms tingle; my throat pulls taut. Ghost tongues lick the shells of my ears.
Behind me, I hear my Hanwa name.
The amphitheater goes liquid and slow, my hands frozen in the sign of universal surrender. Beyond the stage, half a thousand souls suck in the last oxygen they will ever breathe, blood sliding acrid down their throats.
Focus. One slipped note and the song’s power will ricochet. We will have to start over, if we have not already crumbled to powder—begin again and again until the fabric of the world bows, burns.
I hold the F-sharp behind my tongue. My pulse roars.
I am Kor, I tell myself. I am unbreakable.
My hands rise of their own accord, the old dance beaten into their bones, and on the count of four they fall like blades.
***
You arranged that first and only gathering—gathering, not a performance, because performances were events attended only by the Emperor and his entourage and cause for execution for anyone else. This gathering only a wind-beaten barn on a hillside, steeped in sunlight and old hay; the blacksmith’s sons grunting the piano up the hill as I stood quietly under a blossoming redbud. Only the slow plink of other children’s attempts, their mothers’ dry coughs and light clapping after.
And then. Then. The creak of the old bench, the linen rustle of my new white frock, and my hands danced across the keys as if they had been born knowing, and this was my language: not the stilted sounds I forced out in the schoolhouse, swamped by boys’ laughter and tainted with every word you spoke to me; not my head ducked in silence as the town ladies pursed their painted lips.
This, dark wings curled inside my ribcage. This, singing out of my hands.
No one would quite meet my eyes, after.
You must be twice as good, you said, and I was. I was.
***
Our octet sings of autumn: leaves red as proclamations, sun sunk cold beneath turning ground, high hills sharp with the melancholy of coming snow. It is a melody to tug at your heart and your bones; to take you apart, particle by particle, until all that is left of you is dust.
The prisoners listen, impassive at first. Then Ana slides into the arc of a soprano solo, the rest of us fading on a minor triad, and the darkness loosens like a sigh.
My hands, conducting, go still. From the seats, sand drifts upward, snow-soft, glittering under the lights. Hands disintegrate to nubs, pull out of manacles—except by the time the first man thinks to flee, he has no feet to stand on, then no calves, no knees.
Their eyes are the last to go: pinpricks of light, inscrutable as stars. Some of them, perhaps, the same brown as mine.
When we finish, quiet fills the amphitheater like a sunlit afternoon. Sweat gleams on our foreheads; my throat is a dry scrubland. I meet my singers’ eyes one at a time. We survived. We survived.
Then Cas, the idiot, chuckles—and we fall to our knees, howling with a laughter that should not be.
***
Maestro meets me outside the green room. His hair is dusted white—the third-years’ clean-up Whirlwind not terribly precise yet—but his uniform is starched ceremony-sharp.
“The Council would like to hear you in Kelsburg,” he says, both hands clasping mine, and a strange vertigo twists inside me, as if I have left my body. “They’ve commissioned a new octet from Carl Lang. Mountains and Night Sky. Absolutely sublime.”
The old man’s face ghosts the edge of my vision, his eyes flashing a warning. No.
But he has no power over me. Not anymore.
“Perfect,” I say, and smile so hard it hurts.
***
The morning after the gathering, the soldiers came to our town.
Flash of white at my bedroom window, song trailing the air like the first breath of summer, and I slammed out the door, my heart a bird thumping between my ribs.
“Take me with you,” I shouted, and my voice slapped the walls of other houses, cracked through my neighbors’ open windows. The blacksmith’s curtains flicked. I didn’t care. “I’m ten, I play the piano, my father wants me to go to university for it but I’d rather learn to sing—”
The Kor stopped in midair.
Two towering pillars of white, golden hair and eyes of lightest ice. Angels, I couldn’t help but think, come to answer the prayer sung by my hands.
“How old did you say you were?” the one to my right asked, and even their voice was a melody.
I lifted my chin. “Ten.”
“Then we will have you tested for the Conservatory.”
They did not ask my name. One of them nodded over my shoulder—to you, stooped in the shadows of the house, the lines of your face deepened with many hours beneath the sun. You, who had seen me run; who were already stooping under the weight of having raised a traitor.
You touched your interlaced fingers to your forehead in the old manner—I had seen you, some nights, thus salute the shrine in the corner of our bedroom—and bowed.
“Do as you wish,” you said softly, your mouth moving as if you knew some poem, some song, that would not gutter out like a candle in the sweep of the Empire’s storm. You did not look me in the eye. “Be good, child.”
You did not say my name, either.
“I will,” I said solemnly, my feet already turned toward my saving angels, and I meant it, and it was that easy.
***
Curtains rise on arches of stone. Chandeliers slant the walls amber, paint the air honey-thick. This is the Kelsburg Cathedral: a marvel of marble and glass, a prism of glitter when the earth turns toward dawn. Premiere stage for the Great Sound, and for us.
Our audience is eager this time—all powdered wigs and lush velvet cloaks, song-paled faces and bosoms crooned to voluptuousness.
“Sing!” they cry as we circle onstage, our white robes glowing from recent serenade. “Sing!” As if our voices could not kill them in a minute. As if they are not playing with fire.
But we can sing beauty, too, and Mountains and Night Sky carries us to the top of the Empire’s highest peak, the Milky Way flung high into the dark. Out beyond the velvet folds of sound, someone begins to weep.
Come back, you say, and then you are standing beside me on the peak, hand outstretched, and it’s really you this time: dark-haired, broad-shouldered, your mouth hardened the way it did when my fingers slipped yet again on the keys. This is not what I wanted for you.
The song wraps me in gossamer, a silken swath of stars. I keep conducting; my voice skims along roads I have paved in midnight rehearsals and traveled in dreaming. If I stop now, the illusion will wither, cast us as a company of fools. And there is Darbaum to consider: we will not be the first of its graduates to have slipped a note, but Maestro will know, and everyone listening. The school will lose face.
Not now, I think, but you shake your head.
You don’t know what they will ask of you next.
My throat moves in reply. Spit shoots down the wrong path, and shock lances my fists as I choke, try to swallow, breathe, breathe—
Instead, I cough, and the stars break.
***
“Vitka,” Maestro says, and his eyes are so kind. Cas stands silent and knowing behind me; a crimson bandage wraps Ana’s ear where the thwarted song lashed out mid-phrase. “Are you all right?”
Sleet spatters our foreheads. We are huddled outside the cathedral, cold seeping through the cracks in our boots, waiting for a carriage. No songs of unseen horses now—the rest of the company is too afraid to try.
The people dashing past us to ice-slick carriages pay us no mind, as if we have become one with the sopping hedges.
I raise my chin. My throat is dry, now. My knuckles warm with the echo of fingers wrapped around mine.
You used to hold my hand, when we walked into town. As if you could keep me safe.
“Yes, sir,” I say.
Maestro’s gaze flicks to my scarf, and it is my turn to be afraid. “Good.”
***
The next week, Maestro tells me of a whole town, singing. The Empire’s command: Inferno in the broadest parameters we’ve ever cast, a mile-wide radius of destruction.
No, you say, as I grin.
Yes.
***
We sing, we break.
Grandhalls crumble; horse-drawn carriages stagger and burn. A treasonous composer collapses in his ivory tower; seditious dukes gasp their last breaths in Oslar, drowned in oceans of sound and fury. Nobles stop to greet us in the Conservatory halls; Maestro begins to smile once more.
With every song, I tongue the fear at the back of my throat and vow: never again.
But even so. Even so. Your face darts through the fringes of my dreams. Your gravity bends me in an arc around your will. Your voice plunges into the soft place beneath my sternum; slashes down, spilling warmth.
And I feel myself crumble, hourglass-slow, into the shape you always wanted me to be.
So I sing louder. I break faster and for an hour, a day, I drown you out.
***
Our last stop is the Emperor’s palace, Mountains and Night Sky ghosting our inner ears alongside a new commission from the Emperor himself. This stage is its own world—colored glass threads the high beams, wrist-thin stone columns shoot up to a high crimped ceiling; as we arrange ourselves for sound check, sing a few experimental phrases, I think about the time you rode the carriage with me to Hettgart University, folded your hands as I craned my head up at centuries-old frescoes. The Emperor’s commission today is just that: Glory. An alto-tenor duo like a herald-march of trumpets, bass lines austere and forbidding as mountains touched with winterlight. Broken midway, its parameters incomplete, the song will whiplash as utter void.
B, D-sharp, F-sharp. My absolute pitch does not fail me. My hands do not shake as they rise. The eight of us breathe in together and soar from phrase to phrase, harmonies bloomed spring-bright and sparkling with dew.
Halfway through—a golden swell beneath my ribcage, clean scent of ocean, the Emperor’s distant inhale like a catching sob—your voice blows warm in my ear.
I love you.
You know that, right?
My throat closes.
In the silence, I watch my hands fall.
***
I love you.
I don’t know if you did. If you do. I don’t know if this weight you thought was love simply failed to translate, or how much of your strength was desperation, or whether it was a thing you used to know, the way one learns a poem by heart and then loses it to the slow grind of time. I don’t know if I can forgive you for once holding my hand, or myself for needing you to.
Only this: that I was never your promise to keep. That my future was never yours to bequeath me. That you wanted, and I ran, and maybe our need outpaced both of us—yours to sing through me, mine to be more than your song.
But I was always going to be your daughter. I could never have run away.
***
This time, when the song recoils, it shoots straight for my heart. As if it knows.
P. H. Low is a Rhysling-nominated Malaysian American writer and poet with work published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Fantasy Magazine, and Death in the Mouth: Original Horror By People of Color, among others. P. H. attended Viable Paradise in 2019 and participated in Pitch Wars in 2021, and can be found online at ph-low.com and on Twitter and Instagram @_lowpH.
No. She. I have to remember. She’s in hospice, and I’m her son. I’m a son going to see his dying mother. I can do this. It’s not so hard to pretend. There are others. They aren’t me. Every me is someone else.
Although pronouns always seem like figures of speech. Except I. I always fits, and me.
I can fake it. I can pretend. But my mother—she’s a telepath too. I can shut her out, but what son does that? I can do this. What kind of son doesn’t go see his dying mother?
Room 301. It must be in the other wing. Past the kitchen where there’s a stainless-steel vat of some awful toffee pudding. It’s disgusting, and I’m not even sure which of my mouths is eating it. The yellowing wallpaper in the hallway has a nautical theme—reefs and waves and kids building sandcastles. They aren’t me. There’s no mind in paper, no me. If only every me were paper.
What kind of son wishes his mother were paper?
I’m a medical assistant coming down the hall in polka dot scrubs. I’m walking on the other side, glancing at me.
No, she. But a different she than my mother. It’s hard to keep track. Each is like an organ, involuntary functions only. My therapist says thinking like that is egotistical, but how am I supposed to care about others, when others is just something I tell myself?
It just seems so irresponsible, to assume other minds inside other bodies, to extrapolate from my own case. How weak is that? It’s a sample size of one. I had to take statistics, even though I’m a grad student in humanities. Other minds seem so made up.
I remember my name is Laeticia, and I have to pass meds to six residents in the next five minutes. My other name? Her name, even though she doesn’t have a nametag on, and she’s been working a double shift because a co-worker called in sick, that I have been, and I try to smile for me but don’t mean it, and I don’t mean it. I am Laeticia.
Laeticia is someone else. I’m Josh. I’m Joshua.
It’s helpful to frame people as bodies, even though my therapist says that deprives them of dignity. Bodies are distinct. They don’t overlap. Perspectives get confused. Bodies don’t get confused, even when I’m not sure if I’m remembering or mind reading.
Mymom is a body in room 103. The wallpaper above the door is an octopus, all orange arms and suckers. Must be a coincidence, or a bad joke. Octopuses are bad news for telepaths, and not just because I’m allergic to seafood. They’re crowded, like me.
Before I turn into the room, I see my mom from her own eyes: wasted, blue veins, yellowish skin, a bed sore beneath my left thigh. The fan directly above me circulating air. I haven’t bathed and smell like it. Time has set in.
I smell like death.
I recoil, violently away. My mind, our mind, me. Her mind is there, me touching me, trying to hold on, saying, Why aren’t you open to me? I’m your mother. Privacy is for deadheads. No, don’t speak. Why do I have to ask? Why aren’t you open to me? What’s wrong? What’s wrong?
I open myself to her, a sea parting. I turn into her room, and see her, her seeing her, seeing me. Me seeing me.
It’s me dying. There’s no her, not her dying. How could another die?
There’s disengagement. My mother in bed isn’t responsive. She hasn’t been since my stroke. Her stroke. A mind is deep, withdrawn and scuttling on the bottom of a shivering sea, crying for me to see, to see and acknowledge her in her separateness. Not separate as bodies are separate. There aren’t thoughts for it. There’s me.
There’d been such expectation. I cannot speak, but we can speak, mind-to-mind. That should be enough. It should be.
But I am just me to me, crowded on every side. I’m not afraid for her, her dying. I’m afraid for me. Hiding would’ve been kinder.
What kind of son doesn’t believe his mom is someone else?
***
Bao
Before my first session with Joshua, I replace the Georgia O’Keefe prints of desert flowers on the wall behind my desk with people living life: a potluck in early autumn, an older couple embracing, a toddler elbows-deep in birthday cake. I want to get off on the right foot. Joshua’s prior therapist hadn’t worked out for him.
I offer my hand as Joshua comes in. He taps my mind with his mind, and waits for me to return the telepathic greeting. I shake my head.
“I thought we—err, you—were a telepath.” He says you like the word is a conspiracy he isn’t sure he can share. “There was a form at the desk.”
“I’m a weak telepath who was a much stronger telepath.” I can still sense strong emotion, the kind that’s normally plain. But it’s enough for the state. I’m on the Telepath Therapist Registry and have to get “consent for telepathy” forms signed by my patients before I can meet with them.
Joshua doesn’t pry. That’s good. Strong telepaths often become dependent upon their talent and never develop social intelligence. Most likely, he’s Type 2—his talent broke out in adulthood. Although it’s uncommon for Type 2’s to struggle with boxing, distinguishing mind from mind.
“It’s nice to meet you, Joshua. I’m Dr. Luo, although feel free to call me Bao.” He shakes my hand. “Before we begin, I need you to promise me you won’t try to read my mind.” I think I can keep him out, but there shouldn’t be confrontation between us.
“But telepaths are open with us, with one another. Privacy is for deadheads, non-telepaths, I mean.”
“No, it’s not like that,” I say. “You could learn sensitive information about my other patients, and it’s important we trust each other, that we operate on a level playing field.”
Joshua frowns again. I think he expected to communicate mind to mind, that we could work his issues out purely in thought.
“I’m not sure I can do that,” he says.
Is he really so strong that his mind can just wander into mine? “Saddie, come here, girl.” My golden retriever pads over from her plush doggie bed and sits next to me. “If your thoughts wander, just focus on Saddie. She’d love for you to get to know her.”
“Alright, how do we begin?” Joshua asks as he holds his hand out for Saddie to sniff.
“I understand you’re a graduate student in Buddhist studies. The referral I have says that you TA’ed a course and gave all your students the same grade. Do you want to talk about that?” The referral also says that he only responds when addressed in the first person, but he’s past that.
“I was embarrassed, I guess.”
“Why embarrassed?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Joshua says. He’s frustrated enough for me to get a whiff. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure, what do you want to talk about?”
Frustration again. I gather he wants to be led more than I’ve been leading him. “Can we just start again,” he says.
“That’s fine. Next week. We don’t need to discuss everything at once.”
On his way out, he bends to pet Saddie on the neck, where she most likes to be pet. “I’m a good dog?”
***
Joshua
Bao offers me the gliding chair when I come in. Saddie perks up on her mat in the corner with the eucalyptus plant. “Come here, girl,” Bao says. I like dogs. My mom likes dogs too, which makes sense. But occasionally there are cat people. Occasionally, I’m a cat person too.
“About grading my students,” I say. “You asked about that?” You is the hardest pronoun. It’sarchaic, like thou, but everyone thinks it’s fine. “The thing is, we shouldn’t pretend, especially when it comes to morality. If a choice only impacts me, this-me, sure I can just go through the motions, but when I’m grading I’m supposed to be honest. I shouldn’t just make up distinctions I don’t believe in.”
“But don’t you think morality requires an understanding that there are other people?”
“Maybe, I just know it shouldn’t be based on lies.”
Bao says, “When I was a telepath—a stronger telepath—other minds were as plain as day to me, like colors in a rainbow. But telepaths don’t all see the mind the same way. Telepathy didn’t solve philosophy of mind, it just made it more of a social science, more based on interpretation and case studies than on neurology. So I think it’s fine to act from uncertainty, to act even supposing you’re wrong.”
“That just seems, disingenuous, I guess.”
“I can respect that. While we’re being genuine, I’d like to know your reason for coming to see me because I don’t think it has to do with your graduate student funding.”
I figure it’s time to trust Bao. He’s only me after all. “My mother is dying, and I went to go see her. But I knew that I was only afraid for myself. She knew, I mean. I knew that she knew. I—I mean she—was there so thin in that bed, like a bird, and I could only think about me dying.”
“So you want to see her again?”
“I should. I’m her son. But if I go, I’ll just disappoint her again.”
“Your mother’s also a telepath?”
I nod. “She’s non-responsive in other ways, but she can still communicate.”
“Have you considered only opening a part of yourself? I think she would appreciate you trying, an honest effort goes a long way.”
“Not for my mom. She’s very principled, doesn’t appreciate half-measures. She was really vocal in the telepath civil rights movement. We didn’t have much of a relationship when I was young. She was busy, and I hadn’t broken out, and she wasn’t sure how to connect with a deadhead.”
“I see. Are you willing to tell me how much time the doctors have estimated she has?”
I shrug. “Months, maybe less.”
“Hmm, what animal minds have you read?”
This again. “My last therapist had me try crows, chimps, even dolphins. Each was different, but still just me, like backstage on National Geographic.”
“Have you read an octopus?” says Bao.
“No, octopuses are dangerous for telepaths, aren’t they?”
“Oh yes, an octopus is why I’m not the telepath I was. But I think it’s our best shot, if you’re willing to take the risk. Are you?”
“I guess,” I say. “Telepathy hasn’t done me much good.”
“Getting burnt out, like I did, isn’t common. I wouldn’t suggest this if it was, but I want you to think seriously about what not being a telepath would mean to you. If connecting with your mother is what’s important to you, not being a telepath could be a setback.”
“I don’t think I’m going to just outgrow how confused I am. There was so much frustration, disgust even, with me. I couldn’t even acknowledge her without getting tangled up in myself. I couldn’t move beyond the immediacy of my own death, if that makes sense. Is there another option, something that might work fast?”
I already know there isn’t.
“No,” says Bao. “Everything else will be a process.”
“What makes you think an octopus won’t be just like all the animals?”
“The otherness of an octopus’s mind isn’t something you can interpret away. You’re confronted by it.”
***
Bao
I call Samuel, a friend from my roaring twenties, when telepathic skill wasn’t a protected category in anti-discrimination law, and work for telepaths was often underground. Samuel owns an aquarium. Or rather a glass-concrete home he converted from an aquarium, his way of getting around laws against owning exotic pets.
“How’re you, Mindfuck?” he says. I hate that name, but once upon a very high time, I picked it.
“Can I borrow Harriet?”
“Whatever for? I thought you were done with the Games.” He means Mind Games, high-stakes competitions where telepaths try to tease out what the other guy is up to.
“It’s for a patient.”
“Didn’t think shrinks did lobotomies.”
“You know it’s not like that.” Samuel had bet on me in the Games, on Mindfuck. I’d made him a lot of money, until the end when the target was an octopus. Its mosh pit mind was the last mind I read in detail, but it’s not like it fried my brain.
“Don’t think anyone knows the real downside. That’s why I keep Harriet around. Telepaths keep their distance.”
“Listen, he’s on a timeline, and there’s nothing else fast that hasn’t been tried.”
“Fine, although I need proof that your malpractice insurance will cover this if it goes sideways.”
“Thank you,” I say, relieved. I had no Plan B. Aquariums don’t keep octopuses anymore because of the danger. A surprising number of people have telepathic ability they aren’t even aware of and chalk it up to intuition.
***
Joshua
Bao said that I wouldn’t be able to keep the octopus out, that telepathy is like breathing for them. It’s how they organize themselves.
He hadn’t been exaggerating. Never been good at keeping thoughts in one body. No resistance, no greeting. Privacy is for deadheads. Drowning. I’m drowning. I’m?
There isn’t glass between us. There isn’t water. I’m breathing water. I have two thousand fingers. How many brains? Each sucker moves separately. Like a finger.
Arms in my brains. My arms have brains? Our arms have flourishing brains. They’re changing color, for camouflage. And we’ve never liked crab so much, have we? But we thought we were allergic to seafood. Ha, I’m an octopus allergic to seafood.
That isn’t right. Reading is supposed to be all surfaces and reflections. That’s what made me continue in Buddhist studies in the first place. The raw perception that mind is not a substratum. There’s nothing of a soul, none that we’ve seen. It’s just momentary thoughts, arising and collapsing into nothingness. Memory isn’t a vault, even an empty vault. It’s just what’s being remembered.
Reaching out, pulling down. Embracing myself again, wanting to know more. Arm in arm in arm. There’s no surface tension, we’re deep, like angler fish deep. Deep memory, intentions, the wavering behind, all the roiling behind consciousness. We’re probing: A threat? Have crab? Fish? Help us escape?
The inner voice is not one voice. We know that now. I had selected one voice and superimposed it on others: I’m a self. We should be too. But telepathy is how we coordinate, arms and head and beak and mouth. We are a swarm, passing messages, whispering.
I am an I—this helped us along, helped us pretend. I am an I made all the fissures in self incongruous. Remembering lives that don’t quite square with us, reading them, contrasted with the persistent sense that I am a unity, an I. We could hypothesize an I that is you.
But the struggle is gone now. What is you to us? We are not alien. The otherness is already inside. These words are not just a mystery, gawked at from the outside. They’re madness driven upon us, like a screw. That madness holds us together, keeps us sane. We are Laeticia. We are Bao. We remember. We are everyone—all voices synchronized.
What is another to us?
What is our mother to us?
We wish to know the answer. Ignorance is threatening. Sharks and eels eat the ignorant. But I—that abstraction, that monolith, that tight unity we no longer have use for—does not want to give an answer. It calls itself Joshua. It wants to hide that part of itself. It is selfish, covetous.
But we are not shark. We are not eel. We believe this. There is no reason, just as there is no reason for our arms being us—but still we go about believing it. Once when we were young, a shark tore our arm off and swam far away. The arm was still us, for a while—and then it grew back—but the shark never was. This we believe.
We believe we are not Joshua.
She turns, swims away. Sprays ink in the water.
I am Joshua. Not Laeticia. Not Bao. I am not my mother. They’re away, far away, separate.
I recall that, in some Buddhist traditions—some Mahayana traditions with all the bhumi levels and bodhisattvas with swords, the kind that always seemed like sophistry to me—the idea is that ultimately there are no distinctions. Distinctions only arise in the mind, and ultimately, even the distinction between minds and not-mind is a convention. Even mind breaks down under analysis. Even analysis breaks down.
Someone who realizes this, truly realizes this and is enlightened, doesn’t just dissolve into the ether, they don’t shed their connections with other minds. They return to everyday life and adopt its conventions. They put on everyday experience, like a freshly laundered suit. Not because everyday experience is real and other experience is not. Because they feel overwhelming compassion to help others realize the truth they experienced. So to teach, they reassume the same conventions that everyone believes.
Strangely enough, I think that’s what the octopus does when it approaches a mind and disengages to go about other business. There’s no reason for me to be different from her any more than there’s reason for her arms to all be the same mind. Each has its own brain. Each has autonomy. But because of evolution or some knack, she just assumes these are her, others are not. She has no principled reason. It’s not the way of things. It’s her way.
I think it can be my way too.
***
Bao
Joshua and I convince his mother’s hospice that we need to check her out, even though she’s actively dying and non-responsive, at least to anyone that isn’t a telepath. It doesn’t help that the only van Joshua could rent on his grad student stipend is a real rust bucket.
They recommend against it, strenuously. But they don’t have any telepaths on staff, so eventually they just go along with the idea that Joshua knows what is best for his mother. Though he has to wave his power of attorney in front of their director of nursing before she backs off. She insists that none of her staff will drive the van, which is precisely the point. The point is for Joshua and his mother to be alone. Undisturbed. Just two people.
I drive the van. I’m very good at not disturbing telepaths, at keeping them out. Playing Mind Games as long as I had will do that to you. I drive out of town, to green space between soybean fields after the suburbs taper off. There must be wildlife about, deer and field mice and gophers and worms, but this is the best we can do. Joshua never suggests it is less than enough.
Joshua and his mother are two people together, saying goodbye, mind to mind as telepaths do.
Author’s Note: This story was inspired by my interest in the problem of other minds: How can we know minds other than our own exist? (Answers range from “We can’t” to “We can, and other minds can know our mind better than we do!”). The problem is especially interesting when considering minds of the radically other, like octopuses. The Buddhist studies angle came out of discussions I had with a professor in graduate school about whether certain Buddhist philosophies, like the Middle Way of Nagarjuna, are coherent or are meant to be.
Andy Dibble writes from Madison, Wisconsin, and works as a healthcare IT consultant. He has supported the electronic medical record of large healthcare systems in six countries. He holds a master’s of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School as well as degrees in computer science, philosophy, religious studies, and Asian studies. His fiction also appears in Writers of the Future, Mysterion, Sci Phi Journal, and others. He is Articles Editor for Speculative North and edited Strange Religion: Speculative Fiction of Spirituality, Belief, & Practice. You can find him at andydibble.com.
