DP FICTION #108A: “BUDDY RAYMOND’S NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO DRONE HUNTING” by Gillian Secord

edited by Chelle Parker

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.

I’m proud of you, kid.

I was always so damn proud of you.

–  BUDDY RAYMOND

© 2024 by Gillian Secord

1894 words

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.

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DP FICTION #107B: “They Are Dancing” by John Stadelman

edited by David Steffen

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.

© 2024 by John Stadelman

2311 words

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.

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The Secret Origin of Hestu: Legend of Zelda Headcanon

by David Steffen

If you’ve played either of the two recent Nintendo Switch-based Legend of Zelda games (Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom) long enough, you know Hestu, the most distinct of the Koroks. After playing these games and other games in the Legend of Zelda series for many, many hours, I have “discovered” (developed a headcanon) that explains the secret origins of Hestu and why Hestu is different from all the other Koroks.

Who Is Hestu?

If you’re not familiar: The Koroks are forest spirits whose home is in the Korok Forest which is protected from the outside world by The Lost Woods which earns its name by being filled with a confounding fog that will take you back at the entrance if you wander from a pre-set path. Although that’s their home, they can be found all over Hyrule, approximately a thousand of them to find in little hiding spaces (plus some more that aren’t hiding). Koroks as a whole look like little roughly crafted humanoid child-like figures with a big leaf for their face. Each Korok looks a little different, from the color and shape of the leaf to the exact proportions of their body but generally they look like this. They can be found hiding under rocks, or will appear from nowhere if you win little shooting games or spatial puzzles or other little challenges. They are generally childish and fun-loving and love to play hide-and-seek. Tears of the Kingdom added a recurring new kind of Korok: the traveling Korok who is going to visit a friend but has packed such a large backpack that it has grown too tired too move. Finding or helping this multitude of Koroks will give you the reward of Korok seeds. Which is a little weird if you think about it–are those like Korok babies? Apparently the game-makers intended them to be Korok poops.

The use for poop-scooping for the Korok kids is unclear until you meet Hestu. After helping with a side quest in Breath of the Wild to recover Hestu’s magical maracas, he asks if you can help him find all the Korok seeds that the mischievous little Koroks have stolen from him, and whenever you do Hestu will perform a magical dance that will expand your weapon, bow, or shield inventory slots.

Okay, so what is Hestu’s backstory? After playing Breath of the Wild, and after playing Tears of the Kingdom for dozens of hours, I had not really given it any thought at all. Why does he need a backstory? He’s the forest spirit dude who expands your inventory and while he is likeable and funny and useful, does he really need a backstory? Until the connection spontaneously popped into my head.

Hestu’s Origin

I randomly realized where Hestu came from: Tingle finally fulfilled his greatest wish to become a fairy. Hestu is Tingle transformed!

I will go into more detail below, but even superficially they have quite a few similarities. They are both adults with facial hair (OK Hestu’s beard is a leaf, but it appears to be in the place of facial hair), taking on the appearance in some way of an adult version of the Great Deku Tree’s children. They both have a love of words they made up (“Kooloo-Limpah” vs “Shak-Shakala”, though the latter is probably onomatopoeia for the sound of maracas, it is not a common onomatopoeia as far as I am aware). They both have a preference for glitter.

Wait, Who?

OK, so if you’ve only played the Zelda games on Nintendo Switch you might not know who Tingle is.

Tingle first appeared in Majora’s Mask which was released in the year 2000. Tingle claimed to be the reincarnation of a fairy, something which has been a central part of his character in all of his appearances. He is 35 years old and his father who works at the swamp tourist center is exasperated by his son’s insistence that he is a fairy. Tingle wears a green jumpsuit with a pointy hood, presumably meant to resemble Link’s classical outfit of a green tunic with a pointy hat. He can often be found in that game floating above a scene attached to a big red balloon. If you pop the balloon he will fall to the ground and will sell you maps of different areas.

He’s appeared in several other games, most notably in The Wind Waker where he has a more prominent role, but keeps the same backstory, claiming to be a fairy.

Supporting Evidence

Bear with me, there are quite a few pieces of information I took into account for this theory.

Tingle does not directly appear in the Switch games, but he is referenced. There is a “Tingel Island” on the east coast of Hyrule. In the Breath of the Wild expansion pack, and in the regular Tears of the Kingdom game, there is a Tingle clothing set. The clothing set could be an alt universe thing, like a branched timeline–it seems like at least some of the Link-themed clothing sets come from alternate universes, so Tingle’s might be the same. But Tingel Island seems like more of a solid clue that it’s not only an alt universe reference. So I think that could be interpreted as meaning that Tingle has existed by that name in the universe.

When Tingle says he is a fairy, what does that mean? Generally when the Zelda series refers to a “fairy” it is most often referring to a tiny flying glowing creature with transparent butterfly wings. These tend to be able to heal damage to Link instantaneously, or when collected and stored in Link’s inventory may be able to revive Link from what would otherwise be fatal damage. There are also fairies with the same appearance (such as Navi, and Tatl) that help Link by helping him target or by giving him advice.

There are also the Great Fairies which tend to take the appearance of giant women who reside in pools of water and grant Link boons (enhanced clothing or better weapons or shields) in exchange for something (money or monster parts or other things).

But I don’t think Tingle is referring to either of these kinds of fairy. His wardrobe is the biggest clue. Majora’s Mask is a direct sequel to The Ocarina of Time. In The Ocarina of Time, Link has grown up in the Deku Forest. He thinks that he is a Kokiri, one of the forest children who all have fairy companions except for Link. But it turns out that Link is not a Kokiri–his lack of fairy is a clue, but the other Kokiri can also not leave the Deku Forest, and the other Kokiri do not age as Link does in Ocarina of Time. For the actual Kokiri, the fairy seems to be an intrinsic part of their existence–there is no Kokiri without a fairy. From a distance, you can’t see the childlike Kokiri, only the flying fairy companion and the Kokiri fades in as you approach. My interpretation of this is that the fairy is the more real or solid one of the pair, and the childlike form is just a projection from this particular variety of fairy. So, in my interpretation, a Kokiri not only has a fairy companion, it is a fairy and Tingle’s wardrobe is meant to show that.

The next step to understand here is that Kokiri are equivalent to Korok (I had not recalled that this detail was supported by game canon in The Wind Waker, at least according to this wiki page). They both have their primary home in a forest connected to the Lost Woods, with their guardian the Great Deku Tree. They are both childlike in both appearance and behavior (apart from Hestu who has a more adultlike proportion and size, but again Hestu appears to be anomalous). To be fair, their appearance differs, and the Koroks are not limited by the boundaries of the forest. If they are equivalent, what accounts for the differences? Apparently the great flood that caused the world to be a series of islands in The Wind Waker caused the transformation. But it’s not uncommon in the series of the games for familiar things to take very different forms from one game to another. In the original Legend of Zelda game the Zora were just another monster, popping their head out of water to shoot fireballs at Link, but through the different games we have seen that they are sentient being, so we have seen how vastly different a species or race can be from game to game. The shift between Kokiri and Korok is less far-fetched than the shift of the Zoras.

Other Theories About the Anomaly of Hestu

I have wondered since I started playing Breath of the Wild years ago, why there are approximately one-thousand childlike Koroks and then there is one adultlike Korok. What life cycle accounts for this? I wondered if the Koroks are an invasive species and the Deku Tree eats them when they get to be a certain age to avoid them crowding out all other life in Hyrule. I wondered if they are always childlike and Hestu is some kind of random genetic variation. I wondered if the Koroks have a social hierarchy like bees, where changes can be triggered by environmental factors like diet, and the Great Deku Tree is the queen, and Hestu is the queen in training meant to take over the hive when the Deku Tree dies (we know the Deku Tree can die, as it did die in Ocarina of Time).

How It Happened

My thought is: Although Tingle has declared that he is a fairy, I think some part of him realizes that he is not a fairy in any objective sense. So, knowing what he wants, he sets out to find a way to become a fairy. He can either see the Koroks, or read about them in some storybook or heard about them in some myth so he finds out where they came from and goes on a quest to find their home. He eventually finds a way through the Lost Woods and approaches the Deku Tree as a supplicant, begging the Deku Tree to make him into a Korok. The Deku Tree considers for a time, and finally agrees, with a condition. The Deku Tree will turn Tingle into a Korok, if Tingle takes responsibility for all the other Koroks. It’s hard to be a parent to something like one thousand mischievous children who won’t grow up, when you’re ancient and very tired, and also when you’re literally a tree so you can’t even chase them around. A responsible adult Korok, on the other hand, would have much more energy and mobility to caretake the Koroks. Because Tingle is an adult when he was transformed, he took the form of an adult Korok even though that was unprecedented.

Conclusion

Hestu may not canonically be Tingle. But, I don’t think it’s unbelievable that the writers could’ve made it a possibility on purpose. Let me know what you think of the headcanon, if you have your own headcanon. Why do you think Hestu appears to be the only adultlike Korok?

#TingleTransformed #SecretOriginsOfHestu

DP FICTION #107A: “A Descending Arctic Excavation of Us” by Sara S. Messenger

edited by Ziv Wities

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.

© 2024 by Sara S. Messenger

1272 words

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.

You might enjoy the previous story by Sara S. Messenger: “Mochi, With Teeth”. You also might want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

2023 Retrospective and Award Eligibility

written by David Steffen

In 2023 Diabolical Plots published our second guest-edited themed issue, this time for the “Diabolical Thoughts” telepathy theme, guest-edited by assistant editor Ziv Wities.

We have been publishing the annual Long List Anthology since 2015. In 2021 there was a hiccup in the schedule due to WorldCon timing that pushed that year’s Long List Anthology into 2022, meaning there were two volumes of the anthology series in 2022. The entire basis of the anthology is the Hugo Award nomination statistics, so the work to compile the anthology cannot start until those statistics are published, and in 2021 WorldCon (when the statistics are usually published) didn’t happen until December. In 2023, although WorldCon was held in October, they have not published the nomination statistics yet–according to the WSFS constitution they are allowed three months to do so, which means they have until mid-January. This should mean we can get going on the Long List Anthology in January or February, and it will likely be another two-anthology calendar year.

In 2023, we published 23 original stories in Diabolical Plots.

This year we welcomed two new assistant editors to our ranks: Chelle Parker and Hal Y. Zhang (read our staff page for more info on them)

Diabolical Plots opened for general submissions in July. We read more than 1400 submissions and accepted 25 stories from the window. We were running a little behind schedule for publishing stories, so the last few months of 2023 we published one story per month instead of two to stretch the inventory a bit further.

It was a busy year in my personal life as well, including the passing of our dog Mikko who had been a member of the household for fifteen years. This is the second consecutive year that we had to say goodbye to a dog, so I’m hoping we will have a reprieve for a while.

The rest of this post is award eligibility, suggesting categories for major awards, as well as a full link of stories with snippets.

Magazine/Anthology/Editor/Publisher

Diabolical Plots is eligible in the Hugo Best Semiprozine category or the Locus Magazine category with our team of first readers as well as assistant editors Ziv Wities, Kel Coleman, Chelle Parker, and Hal Y. Zhang.

David Steffen is eligible as editor of Diabolical Plots.

I don’t know exactly how editor catogories are interpreted. But at least for Hugo Award for Editor, Short Form it specifies that they must have been “editor of at least four (…) magazine issues (or their equivalent in other media)”. Ziv Wities edited our special “Diabolical Thoughts” telepathy-themed issue, but has also edited many of our other stories. Even assuming we should interpret “issues” as ALL of the stories for a particular month of Diabolical Plots, Ziv Wities qualifies with the four most recent months being: August 2023, March 2023 (Diabolical Thoughts), January 2023, and March 2022.

I think that Kel Coleman might also qualify based on DP work depending on how an issue is interpreted. They have edited more than 8 stories for us, which is more than 4 issues of the usual size, but those were sometimes not entire months. (I think it’d be fair to count that though).

Diabolical Plots, LLC is eligible for Locus award for Publisher.

Related Work

We published just one nonfiction piece this year: “MOVIE ANALYSIS: Elemental (Pixar), a Movie About the Dangers of Government Incompetence” by David Steffen

The Hugo for Best Related Work has included websites before, The Submission Grinder is theoretically eligible for that.

Short Stories

“Dog Song” by Avi Naftali

So you want to determine whether dogs still exist.

First, our association of dogs with obedience. Is obedience dog-like? Or is it to do with horses now, or children, or hamsters. “Hamster-like obedience.” Dogs have retreated into the bodies of hamsters, maybe. They have a real knack for learning, we’re told, and for evolving themselves. There’s no reason they couldn’t take this extra step. Or maybe they don’t exist, dogs have never existed.

“Tell Me the Meaning of Bees” by Amal Singh

On a sunless morning, in the city of Astor, the word ‘caulk’ vanished.

The word didn’t announce its vanishing with trumpets or a booming clarion call. It faded away slowly in the middle of the night, like the last lyrics of a difficult song. The ones who didn’t use the word ‘caulk’ could not even tell what had gone wrong—the non-engineers, the artists and intellectuals—because for all intents and purposes, they would have spent their entire lifetimes not caulking anything.

“The Monologue of a Moon Goddess in the Palace of Pervasive Cold” by Anja Hendrikse Liu

Two centuries ago, I would’ve built thrones made of mooncakes in every room of my silent palace, would’ve filled hot tubs with the fruit sent up on festival night. Nowadays, storing and preserving and pickling feels like a losing race, like if I let even one persimmon spoil in the cold moon air, there won’t be enough to sustain me and Jade Rabbit for the year. 

“Devil’s Lace” by Julie Le Blanc

The demon and I had been crocheting for hours, in what appeared to be a sliver of space it’d created between Here and There. Around a plush couch floated pale, winter fog that obscured anything more than a few feet past the limits of the cushions.

“Rattenkönig” by Jenova Edenson

Kim was always having bright ideas. In sophomore year, he’d bought an honest to God stink bomb from the Internet and set it off in the math class hallway. A girl had an asthma attack, and Mr. Allen had to call an ambulance. You brought this up when Kim suggested driving up to Canada from San Diego and back in the span of a week. Kim laughed, and kissed your cheek. He told you that you didn’t need to worry so much about stuff that had happened so long ago. Besides, Evelyn had come back from the hospital with a brand new rescue inhaler.

“The Hivemind’s Royal Jelly” by Josh Pearce

The figure seated on the other side of the plain metal table has a blank look on its face, like its creator gave up halfway through forming its features. It is dressed in an orange jumpsuit, white socks, black slippers. The handcuff that secures it to the table cuts deeply into the waxy pale skin of its wrist.

“The Desert’s Voice is Sweet to Hear” by Carolina Valentine

Zazy tugged her hood forward to get a sliver more shade. Not today, my friend, she replied. She spotted the bonecrawler nest the desert wanted to convince her was a bubbling spring. Heat fatigue washed through her. For a moment, her eyes unfocused and the trickle of insects did resemble running water. Zazy closed her eyes. No, thank you.

“A Girl With a Planet In Her Eye” by Ruth Joffre

For the first thirteen years of her life, the planet was silent. No birdsong. No construction. Only the gentle sway of an ocean pushing and pulling against the aqueous humors of her left eye. Late at night, while her parents slept, she often lay awake and listened to the dense water solidify itself, the salts forming crystals, the crystals becoming pillars in a great, cavernous hall populated at first by no one, and then: music. A pure, high note so sudden it woke her from her slumber and conjured the image of a miniature flautist performing deep in the canal of her ear.

“Re: Your Stone” by Guan Un

Hi HR,
Just letting you know: I moved the artwork “Higher, Faster, Boulder” from the ground floor lobby up to the Second Floor Cafeteria as per Asset Movement Request #5340 from Asset Management, could you please let me know why it’s been moved back to the ground floor?
Thanks,
Sisyphus

“Bottled Words” by Carol Scheina

Unbottle a voice and it would vibrate through air, giving you one—just one—chance for your brain to turn those waves into recognizable words. But for me, it’s not like I could stop a bottled voice and ask, “Can you say that again?” There was no listening over and over, trying to see if I could recognize a new word here or there. There was no telling a disembodied voice that yes, I could hear it with hearing aids, but no, the sound wasn’t clear enough, or my brain wasn’t able to piece the sounds into words, or that I’d much prefer to read its voice on paper.

“Six Reasons Why Bots Make the Worst Asteroid Miners” by Matt Bliss

1. They think they know everything. Like your twenty years of mining experience is useless compared to a high-acting neural processing drive. Like you’re nothing but a softer, weaker liability, and the only thing you’re good for is greasing their joints and blowing out their compressors. Just one bot and one human to babysit them.

“Diamondback V. Tunnelrat” by Nick Thomas

All parties agree to the following facts. A skirmish broke out between the Diamondbacks and the dwarves during the Brass-Tree autumnal equinox fete. The fete is a centuries-old tradition, occurring every year and held in the foothills alongside the Cenen river. Brawls are as much a part of the festivities as the paper lanterns, the stewing of chicken heads, and the traditional weasel-peasel dance. Neither party makes complaint about the violence done to them or by them at the skirmish.

“They Were Wonderful, Once” by Lily Watson

Even by the third hot, sticky day into our road trip, the humans in the back of the transportation trucks remain fascinating. Theoretically, we know where our blood comes from. But this is different, seeing the little bits of them, poking through the slots on the sides of their container, pressed against the grates for lack of room.

“Interstate Mohinis” by M.L. Krishnan

Sometimes, I dreamed about flowing water. About where I would be—not here, anywhere but here—if my body had survived the accident. Mushed, but still recognizable. With its vestigial humanness that demanded respect, especially in death. My ashes would have been tossed into an ocean or a river in a coursing procession of night-blooming jasmine garlands, women who keened and thumped their chests, and drunken louts who gyrated around my urn until they foamed at the mouth. Until they collapsed in exhaustion or pleasure.

“Glass Moon Water” by Linda Niehoff

The afternoons are sprinklers in the backyard and ice-pops while our sisters and mothers watch flickering soap operas in cold, tomb-like rooms, cold from the AC cranked so low. The nights are sleeping out in the backyard in a tent or a sleeping bag unrolled on porches and decks or even in the grass and looking up at the stars. Listening to the AC click on and hum its silver song through the night.

“The Dryad and the Carpenter” by Samara Auman

Mortals slice us dryads open to count the layers of our lives; it is easier than listening to our stories. They slide their fingers over our rings, thinking that our texture, our shifts in coloration would bring them understanding of their own lives. In their minds, we exist to bring poetry to their sighs and serve as metaphors for longevity.

“On a Smoke-Blackened Wing” by Joanne Rixon

The transformation. The wind under the airplane’s wings buckles as the wings buckle, shake, separate into a beating of hundreds of wings. Out of the fog we come. This time, this first time, we are geese: black-brown wings and furious hearts. We fly awkwardly, at odds with the turbulence; we are newborn, but already the flock is forming as our instincts awaken in the air and we orient ourselves not against the ground or the stars but against each other.

“Shalom Aleichem” by Y.M. Resnik

Every Friday night the angels came, and every Friday night they freaked me the fuck out. Which is probably why I didn’t get a million-eyed, one-footed guardian of my own like the rest of my family. This was totally fine with me. I was in no way jealous that my siblings had angels to accompany them to college while I was stuck sitting alone in an empty dorm room. Who needed a creep-tastic companion whose face consisted of a bizarro series of interlocking cogs and wheels forever whirring?

“Every Me Is Someone Else” by Andy Dibble

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?

“Requiem” by P.H. Low

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.

“Like Ladybugs, Bright Spots In Your Mailbox” by Marie Croke

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.

“In the Shelter of Ghosts” by Risa Wolf

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.

“It Clings” by Hammond Diehl

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.

MOVIE ANALYSIS: Elemental (Pixar), a Movie About the Dangers of Government Incompetence

written by David Steffen

Elemental is a CG animated film published in general release in June 2023 by Pixar. It takes place in Element City, which is populated entirely by people who each are elementals: creatures of the four classical elements of air, earth, water, and fire. It is, broadly speaking, a star-crossed romance story of two people from apparently incompatible cultures falling in love against the odds.

Note that this review contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to know major plot events, stop reading now.

The reason I feel compelled to write up a review for this movie is because, although I generally enjoyed the movie, it didn’t feel to me like the movie was really about what the movie and the marketing for the movie seemed to think that it was about and I wanted to post my opinions on the matter.

Bernie and Cinder Lumen, fire elements, move to Element City where they face distrust and xenophobia from the other elements who consider fire elementals dangerous. They settle in and make a life for themselves despite constant microaggressions from the other elementals as well as the challenges of living in a city that was clearly not designed with fire elementals in mind.

Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) start a store (the Fireplace) and they have a baby, Ember (Leah Lewis), who grows up to be a hot-tempered woman. Bernie dreams of passing the store on to her but has put it off for years because her temper gets in the way. She tends to lose her patience when staffing the store and when her temper gets out of control her temper literally stokes her flames and she starts things around her on fire.

One day, Bernie decides to leave Ember in charge of the store. She becomes overwhelmed with frustration and rushes to the basement so she doesn’t explode in front of the customers. Pipes start bursting and flooding the basement with water and though Ember tries to fix it by fusing the pipes with her fire, it’s not enough a water elemental named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) gets flushed into the basement with the water.

Wade is a city inspector and he immediately starts writing down code violations in the pipes. Ember tries to reason with him but although he seems to feel very conflicted judging by his constant flood of tears, but despite this he apparently feels compelled to submit the reports anyway, which will likely result in the city forcing the Fireplace to shut down.

This is supposed to be the meetcute, I guess, but it’s also where the narrative they seemed to be trying to convey and the narrative that I took from the story sharply diverged. We learn that Wade was on assignment from the city to investigate a leak in the city’s canals when he got sucked into the city plumbing. He was literally trapped in the pipes until a bit of jostling from Ember letting her temper loose in the basement which released him and he burst through the pipes.

So, even from this initial scene:

1. The city has sent a lone employee to investigate a major water leak that relates to a district of fire elementals for which water leaks can literally be lethal.

2. The city apparently has no way to monitor their own waterways. Waterways that could trap water elementals, or extinguish fire elementals.

3. The city has not apparently even considered the safety of their own employee, who can get sucked into and trapped in pipes. Why not send an earth elemental? Or at least send a pair of employees so that a second employee could call for help.

4. The fire district doesn’t need water. No one in the fire district pays for water. Why would they pay for what they have no use for and which could kill them or their neighbors. It was the city’s failure that there was any water in the pipes to leak in the first place.

5. Why does the fire district need to have their pipes up to code, for the water that isn’t supposed to be in their pipes in the first place? City bureaucracy can be an important force for good when it saves people from living in dangerous homes, reduces fire danger, or that kind of thing. But enforcing plumbing codes on a district where water in the plumbing already means that the city has failed in a major way that disregards the safety of its citizens is not a force for good. That’s government bloat for no good reason.

6. The movie doesn’t explicitly say this, but from the way that the events unfold, my interpretation is that the amount of water coming through the pipes was not what caused the catastrophic problem–it was Wade getting washed down the pipes by the water. The water that was a manifestation of the city’s failure to keep the pipes dry, washing their inspector who should never have been in the pipes, only through a combination of his own incompetence combined with the city’s lack of safety measures. Wade writing up citations for plumbing faults after his ass busted through the pipes is like the Kool-Aid Man writing citations for structural damage after he busts through a wall to spread the good word of sugary drinks. The city has caused this problem multiple times over.

7. The movie tries to convey that this is Ember’s fault, and that’ s the interpretation that is stuck to for most of the movie, but there is no reasonable justification for this interpretation. By losing her temper, she exposed the city’s incompetence and saved Wade’s life from starving to death in a city plumbing accident. The movie never admits Wade’s fault in the accident, and doesn’t seem to acknowledge that she saved his life. The only thing that is the Lumen family’s fault at all is not following city building codes that represent senseless government bloat.

8. Does Wade even have the authority to perform an inspection when he was only in the business in the first place because of his own incompetence causing an accident? Is this like police kicking a door down and saying they found the door open to enter without a warrant?

9. If plumbing inspections are required… how have they never happened before on this premises? Is the city supposed to be performing periodic inspections? Is there any attempt to educate residents of the fire district of the requirement for plumbing inspections and what those requirements are? The city has abdicated all responsibility, apparently.

I don’t know about anyone else but I did not find any of this endearing.

After all of this happens, Wade actually starts to listen to Ember and seems surprised that she has extenuating circumstances despite her clearly trying to explain those circumstances to him before he submitted his citiations. Wade was too busy being feeling sorry for himself to listen to the needs of the person whose life he was contributing to ruining.

So at this point Wade decides to bring Ember to his boss, Gale (Wendi McLendon-Covey), to plead a case for leniency to save the Fireplace from closure. They discuss how Wade had been sent to look for the leak in the canals and that’s why he was where he was, and they arrive at an arrangement where if Wade and Ember are able to find the source of the leak then the code violations will be forgiven.

Sigh. Okay, this has gotten even worse.

10. Although the representative of the city inspections has admitted that they have a problem that they haven’t been able to figure out how to solve, and that their inspector’s incompetence contributed to the incident, and that there shouldn’t have been water in those pipes in the first place, they continue to blame Ember.

11. They offer a “deal” for Ember to work uncompensated for the city, bypassing any semblance of a proper hiring process even for a freelancer, under threat of closing her family’s business if she doesn’t succeed in the task that the city has failed to do itself even though it has put in (admittedly meager) effort in the hands of the (admittedly incompetent) city inspector. That… sounds like extortion.

12. Despite this being supposedly important, the two resources they are sending on the job are Wade: their employee who has proven himself incompetent at performing the exact task he is being sent to perform yet again with no additional resources or training to make him better at the task then he was and who last time might have died in the pipes if not for Ember’s temper flareup, and someone who has no employment relationship with them and is certainly not covered by their insurance and WILL BE VERY LIKELY BE KILLED BY WATER WHILE THEY INVESTIGATE A WATER LEAK.

OK. So they go and find the leak, in surprisingly short time for something the city claims to have been looking into for a while. It is a crack in one of the supporting walls for the city canals which constantly have wake overflow from big boats passing through them.

They make an interim fix for the issue by plugging the gap with sandbags. They spend some time together enjoying each other’s company. But: Surprise surprise, the sandbags are not a sufficient fix for the wall and they soon give out as well. Ember uses her fire power to make a sturdier fix by transforming the sand in the sandbags into a structure of tempered glass to plug the game. Once again, Ember saves the city’s ass by fixing what they don’t seem inclined or capable of fixing.

Ember ends up breaking up with Wade after deciding that her family will never accept him. During a party where Bernie will retire and hand over the Fireplace to Ember, Wade arrives and declares his love for her and also incidentally mentions that Ember was to blame for the leak in the basement.

The city then comes and (surprisingly) performs its civic duty and inspects the tempered glass fix and deems it safe. But within about a day the tempered glass breaks. This causes the final major action of the movie as our heroes rush to save the fire district from the flood.

13. Seeing the canals as they investigate everything underlines a significant source of the problems: the city is designed to favor water people in every way. The canals are a terrible civic design with their uncontrolled wake splashover. In our own world, there are no-wake rules in many boat areas to prevent destruction of structures. Why aren’t the walls higher? Why aren’t there no-wake rules?

14. Wade, a specialist in city water inspections should have realized that the sandbags were only a temporary measure against the leak and instead of spending that time socializing he should have spent that time getting on the horn trying to get a proper fix in place to prevent major accident when the sandbags inevitably gave out.

15. The city almost showed a glimmer of competence when they actually inspected the tempered glass wall patch within a very short period of time of it being enacted. Which might have been a redeeming moment for them, if it hadn’t then failed within about a day of the inspection. What exactly are they inspecting for? Most inspections would require building materials to come from a specific approved list, and I gather that the tempered glass concept was novel enough that it wouldn’t have been on an approved list–and for good reason because they clearly had no concept of the long-term permanence of such a structure.

16. Wade “accidentally” revealing that Ember was the one who caused the leak in the basement during Bernie’s retirement party would have been a shitty thing to do, even if it were true. Which it wasn’t.

Up until his “accidental” revealing, I had thought Wade might be redeemable if he ever owned up to his own responsibility, accepted fault for the things that are his fault instead of hiding behind his tears and laying all the blame on those who don’t deserve it. But he never at any point in the narrative does any of this. When he revealed the false information that the leak was Ember’s fault in front of her family despite the fact that the leak was really the city’s fault (and their continued danger continues to be the city’s fault), and which was certainly more Wade’s fault than Ember’s fault, that he chose this junction to declare this false information is, in my opinion, irredeemable.

The city’s greatest failure in the movie is revealed when the patch in the wall breaks and they all have to fight to keep everyone in the fire district from being killed by the flood and Wade does a big heroic thing to help their family. For which I agree they should be grateful, but I wish they had not ended up together, or at least that Wade would have at the very least taken some basic responsibility instead of throwing Ember under the bus at the worst possible moment.

Of course, Ember and Wade ending up in a romantic relationship at the end of the movie is probably reasonably assumed to be a foregone conclusion because the movie is marketed and presented as a romance instead of (IMO) what it really is: a drama about the importance of the role of city government to keep its people safe, and the lives in peril that can be caused by that city government’s incompetence.

DP FICTION #106: “It Clings” by Hammond Diehl

edited by David Steffen

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.

© 2023 by Hammond Diehl

829 words

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. 

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Diabolical Plots Lineup Announcement! (from July 2023 Window)

written by David Steffen

Hello! I am here to announce the original stories that were chosen from the general submission window that ran in July 2023.

First, some stats:
# of Stories Submitted: 1451
# Rejected (First Round): 1350
# Rejected (Final Round): 40
# Withdrawn: 32
# Disqualified: 2
# Rewrite Requests: 2
# Accepted: 25

This is not quite the most submissions we have ever received in a window (that was 1938 in January 2021), but it is the most authors we’ve received submissions from and the most submissions we’ve received since we reduced the number of allowed submissions per author from 2 to only 1.

This window did take longer than we usually like them to take to fully resolve–a little over 3 months after the end of submission window. I think we should ask for some additional volunteers to join the first reader team–we haven’t done a volunteer run for a few years and as people get busy some of them step down or scale back so we’ll probably need to build the group back up again periodically.

For this submission window we welcomed two new assistant editors: Chelle Parker and Hal Y. Zhang, who helped resolve submissions and helped make the final selections listed below. They join the assistant editor team of Ziv Wities and Kel Coleman.

This window marked a few changes:

1. This is the first window we’ve run since generative “AI” was available enough that people were routinely using it to write fiction. In response the guidelines were updated to ask writers not to submit fiction written using it, the submission form asked writers to affirm that they did not use these programs in writing their work, and for writers who received acceptances the contract required them to state that as well.
2. We had previously had a “Withdraw” status in the system, but the status could only be set by the editor so the writer would have to email the editors to ask to have it withdrawn. In this window we added the ability to “self-serve” a withdrawal. This was added partway through the window so not everyone saw it. When the confirmation email gets sent it includes a withdrawal link that the author can use to withdraw on their own without needing to contact the editor.
3. We added a “Rewrite Request” functionality in the last few days. We occasionally did rewrite requests before but they were done completely apart from the system by email. Now rewrite requests are supported in the system with an official status. When the email is sent for the rewrite request, it copies the requesting editor and assistant editor so the writer can reply to ask questions or discuss. It also provides the author with a one-time link they can use to submit the rewrite. This link can be used even when there is no open window. If a writer submits during an open window the rewrite using this link doesn’t count against their submission limit for the window.

We accepted 25 stories from this general submission window (one of which we announced separately and already published due to time constraints)

These stories will all be published in 2023-2024; I look forward to sharing them with you!

And here is the list, in alphabetical order by author name:

The Lineup

Level One: Blowtorch
by Jared Oliver Adams

St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test
by Mary Berman

The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds
by Renan Bernardo

The Lighthouse Keeper
by Melinda Brasher

It Clings
by Hammond Diehl

Ten Easy Steps To Destroying Your Enemies This Arbor Day
by Rachael K. Jones

Hold the Sea Inside
by Erin Keating

Batter and Pearl
by Steph Kwiatkowski

The Gaunt Strikes Again
by Rich Larson

Six-Month Assessment of Miracle-Fresh
by Anne Liberton

Phantom Heart
by Charlie B. Lorch

A Descending Arctic Excavation of Us
by Sara S. Messenger

Song for a Star-Whale’s Ghost
by Devin Miller

Eternal Recurrence
by Spencer Nitkey

Letters From Mt. Monroe Elementary, Third Grade
by Sarah Pauling

The Geist and/in/as the Boltzmann Brain
by M. J. Pettit

In Tandem
by Emilee Prado

Bone Talker, Bone Eater
by D. S. Ravenhurst

Dreamwright Street
by Mike Reeves-McMillan

This Week in Clinical Dance: Urgent Care at the Hastings Center
by Lauren Ring

BUDDY RAYMOND’S NO-BULLSHIT GUIDE TO DRONE HUNTING
by Gillian Secord

How to Kill the Giant Living Brain You Found In Your Mother’s Basement After She Died
by Alex Sobel

They Are Dancing
by John Stadelman

In the Shelter of Ghosts (already posted at the time this announcement is posted)
by Risa Wolf

Ketchōkuma
by Mason Yeater

DP Fiction #105: “In the Shelter of Ghosts” by Risa Wolf

edited by David Steffen

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.

© 2023 by Risa Wolf

3538 words

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.

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Submission Window Update: First Story Announcement and Schedule Info

written by David Steffen

Hello! I’m here to give an update on the general submission window where we were taking submissions from July 17-31. We received 1451 stories for the submission window. The first round is complete, so everyone should have received an initial response of either a rejection or a hold notice. If you haven’t received one, check your spam folder, you can check your status on the submission site if you have your confirmation name, otherwise you can query us immediately.

Normally I announce the story lineup all at once with all the months, but we are running a little later than I had hoped, and so I’m slipping in the first story announcement right here:

The November story will be:
In the Shelter of Ghosts
by Risa Wolf

We have a couple other acceptances in hand, and we are having discussions right now to finalize the rest of the list.

On a related note, because we are running a little later than we had originally planned, we are publishing one story a month for a couple months to connect the schedule up. But we’re planning to return to our usual cadence of two stories a month at that point.