Fantasy – Diabolical Plots

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

edited by Chelle Parker

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

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

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

None of them can hear the bones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know.”

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

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

“Will you run?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recognize the voice of the village headwoman, Leppa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alone, but not alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better you’re with your own kind.

The bones? Or the Bone Eater?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I snort.

“That’s why you should join me.”

“I don’t understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someday they will not be the only ones who scream.

3089 words

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

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

edited by Ziv Wities

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

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

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

“My Lord,” says Habsor. “A pleasure.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Your Lordship is too kind. Shall we?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Flyers,” says Habsor. “Flyers only.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

“But… how?” asks Habsor.

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

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

“Boy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A young man?” queries Habsor.

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

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

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

His eyes closed, he tastes a dream of freedom.

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

2282 words

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

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

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

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details)

Content note: emotional abuse and physical harm between teens, body horror.

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

***

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

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

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

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

Until it didn’t.

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

Until I wasn’t.

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

***

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

***

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

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

I have so much of Sephina inside me now.

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

1585 words

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

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DP FICTION #112B: “Hold the Sea Inside” by Erin Keating

edited by Chelle Parker

Content note (click for details)

Content note: This story contains references to intimate partner violence and alcohol abuse.

Among the crags of the mountains weeps a cascade of salt water. In the pool beneath, stiff-peaked foam drowns careless men and sickens parched animals. The menfolk say it’s devilry to find salt water so far from the shore, but we know better. It’s no devil’s work but woman’s grief.

Standing on the stony peaks across the valley, the falls look like a woman: her head tipped back, hair spilling over her shoulders, skirt swirling around her legs. From that distance, the rush of water is mistaken for a woman’s voice echoing through the hills, laughing and wailing in turn.

***

Once, Maribel knew no mountains. She knew only the ocean, rising to meet the cobbles before her father’s house, and then her husband’s. Maribel would open salt-streaked windows to feel the sea breeze, listen to the fishmongers hawk their wares, and pray to the waves.

Maribel would pray, “Please let today’s catch be good.”

The sea would reply, More, more, more, and her husband’s net would be the heaviest of his crew.

Maribel would pray, “Please let his ship be delayed.”

The sea would reply, Cease, cease, cease, and her husband’s ship would creak late into port against an unfriendly tide and a windless night.

Maribel would pray, “Please let him return home tired.”

The sea would reply, Sleep, sleep, sleep, and her husband would crawl to bed without so much as a glance at her.

The sea was a god to her, ever-present, holding her fate in its grabbing hands. She worshipped it, and it cared for her like no one ever had.

But then there was an accident, an accusation, a falling out. Her husband refused to speak of it. Instead, he said he tired of the sea, and they were moving inland. When Maribel took her last look over the waves, she prayed to the hungry tides that swallowed the land mouthful by mouthful.

“Keep me here. Let the undercurrent hold me fast.”

Her husband told her to hurry up, his hand heavy on the back of her neck. Even though the sea was right there, urging her to stay, stay, stay, Maribel left.

***

Maribel no longer cleaned salt-streaked windows. Now, they were streaked with silt and smoke. Her husband, who had once known the expanse of the open ocean, had become an iron miner in tunnels too narrow for his body. He came home after the last bell, stooped and wheezing. The sea breezes and fishmongers were memories; now, the only tides were of men shuffling to and from the mines.

She still prayed to the sea, though she was too distant now for it to answer. Its voice had followed her only so far west. Through the tidal basin, the humid air droning with dragonflies, the sea had demanded stay, stay, stay, in a voice like an incoming storm. Through the golden farmlands reeking of wet grass and manure, the sea had urged stay, stay, stay, in a voice like a sly current tugging at her ankles. Then they had reached the mountains, and the sea had punished her with its silence.

Maribel longed to cry for all she had lost, if only to feel the familiar sting of salt on her cheeks. But something in her had withered in her time among the silt and smoke. She couldn’t spare a single tear.

***

One night, when the first crocuses cracked through frozen earth, Maribel heard the sea again. It seeped into her dreams, buoying her to the surface of sleep.

Rise, rise, rise, it whispered.

Maribel rose groggily.

Look, look, look, it whispered.

Maribel went to the window.

In the utter darkness, lights bobbed in the distance. For a moment, she thought she was back in the salt-streaked house, watching ships blinking like stars on the horizon. But then acrid ash bit her tongue, and she was in that godforsaken mining town, looking out over the hills.

“It’s just like it was,” Maribel whispered.

Was, was, was, the sea echoed.

The lights drew closer and closer, until a gray dawn revealed they were not ships at all—but a circus.

The performers carried spring with them. Lavender and rose tents sprouted like fresh blooms, lanterns strung between them like fireflies. A moss-green banner proclaimed, “Phineas Fisk’s Fantasies and Phantasmagoria.” After months of bare trees, gray sky, and pale smoke, Maribel was nearly drunk on the colors alone.

The first night of the circus, Maribel wandered from her husband, who cared more for the beer than for the miracles hidden behind each tent flap: the fortune teller with her hunched shoulders shrouded in layers of gauzy silk, the contortionist who combed her long red hair with her toes, the scar-faced man who swallowed swords and fire.

Then, from outside one of the tents, rose a voice like rain.

“Ladies and gentlemen, come see the pearl of my collection. I, Phineas Fisk himself, bring you a wonder from the sea’s dark depths!”

A crowd gathered, surging like the tide. Maribel let herself get swept up in it, bobbing along in the current.

“Beware, faint of heart—this creature will seduce men and women alike to drag them down to watery graves. Please form a line—nice and orderly now. Have your admission fee ready.”

Phineas Fisk held out his gloved hand to collect Maribel’s money as she filed inside.

All of the noise from the circus ceased. Maribel was bathed in a pale green darkness. The air smelled vaguely of fish and brine. At the center of the tent, a boxy shape hid beneath a burlap cloth. A strongman stood beside it, keeping the crowd at bay.

Phineas Fisk swept into the tent, crushed-velvet coattails flapping behind him. “Ladies and gentlemen. I hope you are prepared for what you are about to see. You lucky few, who may look on this wonder and yet live to tell of it.” He stood beside the strongman, his fingers grazing the burlap. Maribel found herself holding her breath as she did in the moments before a storm.

“Behold, the mermaid,” he declared.

He whisked away the cloth.

A hurricane swept through Maribel’s chest as she strained to see. Before them stood a glass tank filled with murky green water—and something swimming.

Long silver tail. Feathery dorsal fin. Scaled skin, translucent as sea glass. Strands of kelp for hair.

And that face. Her face.

The creature in the tank pressed its webbed fingers to the glass. The sea roared in Maribel’s head, too loud to make out the words.

It was her. It was Maribel in that tank, if she had a tail instead of legs, if she had gills instead of lungs. If she had been born of the sea.

She pushed through the crowd like a storm surge. She needed to see; she needed to know. Maribel pressed her fingers to the glass, but the creature darted back into the murky swirl.

“Step back, ma’am.” The strongman braced his thick arm between Maribel and the tank.

And then Maribel was herself again. The face she saw was a reflection of her own in the glass.

But she had heard the sea, as loud as if she’d been standing with her feet in the coarse sand, letting the foam spray against her shins.

She had heard it, and it brought her home.

***

The second night of the circus, Maribel was the first person in line to see the mermaid. Clouds of dark dust streaked through the air, dimming the lights that bounced between the tents. Phineas Fisk wore the same crushed-velvet coattails and greedy gloves.

As soon as she was inside the tent, Maribel took a deep breath of the briny damp. She settled on a bench across from the burlap-covered tank, her eyes adjusting to the pale green light. Already, she could hear the sea, a low groan that she could understand if she tried hard enough.

You, you, you, it said. Maribel sighed—it remembered.

While Phineas Fisk pontificated about the perils of the mermaid, Maribel whispered under her breath, “What do you want me to do?”

Phineas Fisk whisked away the burlap cloth, and there was the mermaid again. Silver fins flicked through the swirling green water.

The sea replied, drowning out the awed gasps of the crowd, the tinny din of the circus, the constant grumble of the mines.

Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home.

Maribel glimpsed a face in the tank—her own, but not quite. Her face, but with urchin-black eyes. Her face, but with an extra row of teeth.

“I’ve missed you,” Maribel murmured, as quietly as she could.

The sea repeated, Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home.

A lump hardened in Maribel’s throat, too parched to swallow it down. She squeezed her eyes shut, as if that could press tears from them. No matter how much she willed it, not a single drop spilled down her dust-caked cheeks.

Instead, Maribel whispered, “I will do whatever you need. I will do whatever you want.”

Phineas Fisk leaned over from his place beside the tank. “Pardon, madam, are you quite well?”

“Quite,” Maribel said.

The sea whispered around her, its voice curling like inky tentacles over her skin. The mermaid swam before her, that other-self smiling with its many teeth.

Maribel could not recall a time she had been better.

***

On the circus’s final night, Maribel donned her nicest dress, one she hadn’t worn since they had arrived in the dust and silt. It shone a sea green, and among the grays and browns of her clapboard house, the color was almost too bright to look at.

“Where are you going?” her husband slurred. He rose from the table, the tension in the filmy air rippling around him.

Maribel didn’t dare respond. Both to answer and to ignore would provoke their own distinct angers. Outside, the night promised her shadows and smoke, and a chance to slip away unharmed.

“To the circus again, to spend my money?” her husband accused. But he fell to wheezing. Sharp breaths rattled in his chest, stuffed with silt. Already stooped, he doubled over on himself, smaller and smaller until Maribel thought he might disappear. He gasped, the hands that had been reaching for her now clawing at his own chest.

Maribel ran without stopping for her shoes.

***

At the mermaid’s tent, Phineas Fisk looked her up and down—her too-nice dress, her too-bare feet. He closed his gloved hand to her. “Perhaps you should see our other marvels this evening.”

Maribel held up twice the admission fee. Phineas Fisk’s thin eyebrows arched. She held up thrice the admission fee.

Finally, that gloved hand unclenched, and she placed the money firmly in it.

“Enjoy,” Phineas Fisk crooned in his voice like rain.

Maribel sagged into the first bench like a lifeless sail. The damp air of the tent soothed her burning lungs and cracked cheeks that had not known a single tear since she had left her home by the sea.

You, you, you, the sea greeted her.

“Me, me, me,” Maribel answered in kind.

Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home, the sea demanded.

“Soon, soon, soon,” she promised. As she had tossed sleeplessly the night before, as she had cleaned the dirt and silt from her windows, her thoughts had been consumed by nothing but how she would free the sea.

Phineas Fisk stood before the crowd. By now, Maribel had memorized his monologue. When he whisked away the burlap with that dramatic flair, a hurricane no longer swept through Maribel’s chest. Instead, there were only calm waters. The mermaid pressed her webbed hands to the glass before darting away. Maribel marveled at how like her own hands they were, too small to keep her safe.

Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home. The sea’s voice was so close now, its gentle breeze tickled the back of her neck. The smell of salt pressed closer.

And Maribel wondered what she could do.

***

Maribel stayed until rosy dawn shone through the tent’s pale green light. Peanut shells littered the packed earth floor, and the first warm breeze of spring swept under the canvas. All was silent, save for the shush of the water.

A gloved hand came down on Maribel’s shoulder. “It’s time for you to go home,” Phineas Fisk said.

But what did Phineas Fisk know of her home? Surely he didn’t mean for her to return to her clapboard house, with her husband stooped and wheezing, with smoke and dust burning her throat with every breath. Home was salt-streaked windows, fishmongers, and a sea breeze. Home was the pale green light of this tent.

The sea roared in her head, tossing her thoughts like a gyre.

Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home.

“Please, a few more minutes.” She needed more time. She did not know yet how she would save the sea from the glass tank that held it. After all it had done for her, she could not abandon it now.

“Have you fallen in love with her?”

“No.”

And it was true, Maribel was not in love with the mermaid. She was the mermaid. She had left her soul with the sea, and it had returned to her in the form of this creature. She would not be parted from it again.

“Have you looked at it closely?” Phineas Fisk asked. “Tell me what you see.”

The sea echoed, See, see, see.

Maribel crossed the packed earth floor, feeling the warmth of sand beneath her bare feet. The early light rippled like the surface of the ocean.

Maribel stood so close that her breath fogged the tank glass. When the fog cleared, the mermaid blinked up at her, eyes black as the depths of Maribel’s beloved sea. Her pale lips parted in a jagged-toothed smile as though she too had been waiting.

The mermaid placed her fingers against the glass walls. Maribel mirrored the gesture, the cold glass sweating condensation between them. She pressed harder, as though the glass would give way, and she would find herself in the water.

“Bring me home, home, home.” Maribel whispered the words of waves and wind to the only being who shared her grief. The mermaid murmured them back.

“Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home,” Maribel pleaded.

The mermaid pushed herself up, breaking the surface to rest her forehead against Maribel’s.

Undulating waves rushed through Maribel’s ears. She tangled her fingers in the mermaid’s kelp hair, whispering her prayers against the mermaid’s jagged mouth.

The mermaid’s wet, scaly skin felt like the damp sand of home. Maribel gulped down the mermaid’s salty, fishy breath like a drowning woman come up for air. She was the sea, as ever-changing and unknowable. Maribel wanted to be wrapped in those arms and pulled down, down, down.

“That’s enough,” a voice like rain cautioned.

Maribel froze, one leg draped guiltily over the edge of the tank. The mermaid recoiled, pressing herself against the glass opposite Phineas Fisk. His gloved hand wrapped around Maribel’s bicep. Maribel flinched from the too-familiar gesture.

“I can’t have you drowning on me. They’d run us out of town.”

Drowning. Was that what was happening? The pull of the sea, the shiver of salt around her ankle. If that was drowning, Maribel would drown.

“Let us go, go, go,” Maribel begged.

“People will believe anything, you know, with a good story and poor lighting.” Maribel struggled against him, but Phineas Fisk tightened his grip. “There is no mermaid, only circus magic. You’re trying to drown yourself in a tank of seaweed and fish bones. This is not real.”

No. The mountains were not real. The smoke and the mines were not real. Her husband’s heavy hands and stale-beer mouth were not real. But the sea—the sea was the only real thing Maribel had ever known.

“You lie, lie, lie,” Maribel demanded.

“Look!” Phineas Fisk boomed, his rain voice becoming a storm.

Look, look, look, the sea echoed, gentle as a lover.

Maribel looked. The mermaid’s sea-glass tail flicked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“The show is over. I will have someone walk you home.”

Home—this was home. The swish of the mermaid’s tail and the rush of the sea in her head made demands that grew louder, louder, louder, until Maribel’s thoughts were the same as theirs.

Bring, bring, bring, me, me, me, home, home, home.

Maribel leapt into the tank.

She landed hard against the glass bottom, against sharp fishbones and tangled seaweed. Phineas Fisk’s muted cries gurgled from above the water. Maribel opened her mouth to pray to the sea.

Bring me home.

The salt water rushed down her throat. It said, Welcome home.

The water filled her up, quenching her parched lungs and skin. Maribel wept then, like she had been unable to weep for months. She held the sea inside her, an ocean of unshed tears. She let them go now in a torrent, until the tank overflowed with it. She gave herself to the water, drop by drop.

Just as the tides swallowed the shore, mouthful by mouthful, the salt water consumed Maribel.

Her dust-caked cheeks rippled beneath her touch. Her hands, too small to ever hit back, became tiny columns of sea spray. Her body, far from home, pressed hard against the glass.

Maribel became the sea in the shape of a woman. She pressed harder and harder against the glass, letting out the sea that she had held in her chest all this time.

The tank shattered.

Everywhere was glass and water, light and canvas, and Maribel took it all for herself. She would take it all home, wash the mountainside clean.

Phineas Fisk staggered back, desperately reaching for the tent flap. The pockets of his crushed-velvet coat bulged. Maribel hated him for what he’d done—for taking the sea and selling tickets to see it. The sea did not belong to him. The sea did not belong to anyone. And neither did Maribel.

Maribel surged, sweeping away Phineas Fisk and his crushed-velvet coattails, the lavender and rose tents, the lights like fireflies. Maribel swept away clapboard houses, and the dust and silt, and her husband stooped and wheezing. She swept away everything that wasn’t real, until there was only the sea.

When the sea whispered to Maribel, it spoke in her own voice.

Home, home, home, she urged.

And so Maribel went home, felling ancient trees. Maribel went home, dragging a tide of mud in her wake. Maribel went home, laughing, as she spilled over the cliff’s edge.

***

Among the crags of the mountains weeps a cascade of salt water. In the pool beneath, stiff-peaked foam drowns careless men and sickens parched animals.
Standing on the stony peaks across the valley, the falls look like a woman: her head tipped back, hair spilling over her shoulders, skirt swirling around her legs. When the first crocuses crack through the frozen earth and the first warm breeze of spring rustles the treetops, lonely folks listen for a woman’s voice, laughing, wailing, calling them home, home, home.

3188 words

Author’s Note: I’ve been working on a series of fairytale-esque stories set in the same fictional mountain town, where each story is centered around a different landmark: a ravine, an abandoned house, a heather bald, etc. I saw a photo of a waterfall shaped like a bride and knew that I wanted that to be a landmark that opened and closed one of the stories. This story went through a few complete rewrites—in the earliest versions, Maribel’s husband captured a mermaid and started a traveling freak show—before finally arriving at the more psychological version that it is today. However, that central image of a woman turning into a waterfall never changed.

Erin Keating earned her B.A. in creative writing and literature at Roanoke College and her M.A. in history at Drew University, mostly so she could continue to surround herself with old books. She currently works as a grant writer at an arts education nonprofit. When she isn’t reading or writing, she is rock climbing, playing video games, or learning bass guitar. Her fiction has most recently appeared in Wyngraf, Tales to Terrify, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Find her online at erinkeatingwrites.com or on Twitter @KeatingNotKeats.

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DP FICTION #110B: “Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh” by Anne Liberton

edited by David Steffen

Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh

Submitted November 16th, 2028

By Genevieve Aranha, Chief Manager

Introduction

The Chief Manager requested this assessment to analyze the overall performance of Spirits & Co.’s leading product, the soft drink Miracle Fresh, as a follow-up to the findings presented in the three-month assessment (also included below). All research and data have been gathered on-site by the assigned team over the past ninety-three days, including interviews, medical and financial reports, headlines, and related footage. Those pertain to Brasília alone, where Miracle Fresh was first distributed. That information is fully available from our IT team upon request. We hope this report will provide some clarity as to recommended next steps for making Miracle Fresh a worldwide success.

Background

Miracle Fresh is a soft drink produced by Spirits & Co. since 2027. The original pitch described a holy club soda blessed with droplets of blood from our devoted Messiah, something the average person could drink on the go, après-exercising, or even at [insert holy building of choice] without requiring long tiresome religious proceedings. This idea was abandoned shortly after the company realized a soft drink would appeal to a greater audience, and after considering the lawsuit filed by the parental association Guardians of our Holy Youth (GHY), who worried the club soda would be used as a component of alcoholic mixed drinks. Associating our devoted Messiah with sugar and adding a clear appeal to children did not seem to faze any of the naysayers.

Attached: Pictures from several GHY parties obtained through social media. They feature children below the age of fifteen consuming alcohol and doing a wide variety of drugs. The children’s faces have been blurred to protect their identities.

Since May 2028, Miracle Fresh has been sold as a burgundy soft drink and is available at several stores and markets in the country at a reasonable R$ 4,00 per can. Sales began online and on-site in Brasília, before being distributed to each state capital and to smaller commercial centers around the third month. Two other nations, India and Argentina, have contracted the so-called ‘MiraFever’ due to social-media buzz and are currently developing their own local factories.

Attached: Miracle Fresh official logo:

Have a miracle inside you!

Findings

This assessment has been broken down by time period and demographic for a better understanding of what has changed and what has not during the three-month span between studies. A compilation of this information in its entirety can be acquired through a formal request to IT.

THREE-MONTH ASSESSMENT RECAP

University students aged 18-32 (59 institutions)

After their initial consumption of Miracle Fresh, students claim to be afflicted by a sweet sense of tranquility that lasts for days, sometimes weeks. It helps them navigate academic life with relative ease and even excitement. 67% report they feel more connected to nature after one sip, while 73% say they have formed a deeper relationship with themselves. Additionally, the first group often develops a penchant for flowers; our teams came back wearing crowns on their heads on more than one occasion.

The Guardians of our Holy Youth (GHY)

Following the release of our new marketing plan, the group dismissed their lawsuit and sent a thoughtful thank-you note along with a list of names we should contact in order to offer our product to a wider variety of venues. “All for the benefit of our devoted Messiah.” It appears we have made ourselves some powerful new friends.

Young influencers aged 15-21

Marketing picked a few names for paid partnerships to create one viral video—and they made two. This is how we got India. The key idea was to show alternative external uses for the blessings, such as:

a blessed make-up (“a dab of Miracle Fresh on the eyes works wonders”);

game setup (“rub a few drops on your controller and send that boss to hell”);

stock portfolio*.

* I asked three people and none understood how this could work. Might be just a gimmick; those are also quite popular.

Religious leaders

This demographic was not originally one we were considering and came to us of their own accord, first with a formal email, then through a representative. They demanded proof that we were in fact using our devoted Messiah’s blood in the manufacturing process of the drink, not exploiting the faith of innocent, unsuspecting customers. A petition, signed and stamped, was to be delivered to Congress to demand a thorough investigation of our manufacturing facilities and, should any evidence of fraud be found, that we cease all operations.

We kindly asked them to select a small group to visit the facilities and take a closer look at our manufacturing process. Twenty people accepted the invitation to a tour that lasted fifteen minutes. We did not hear from them again. Miracle Fresh again lives up to its name by bringing together religious leaders of disparate backgrounds, some of which are sworn enemies. The miracle is inside all of us.

SUS Triad – Brasília’s main hospitals

Saint Claire Hospital: Patients are officially requesting (demanding, on occasion) to drink Miracle Fresh before any procedure, to their doctors’ dismay. It interferes with electronic instruments and disrupts the display of digital imaging. A few altercations have been reported.

Our Devoted Medical Center: It seems they anticipated the problems seen at Saint Claire and banned Miracle Fresh from the premises. Legal is analyzing whether Spirit & Co. might have standing for a case against this ban.

Center 1 Hospital: Terminally ill patients are praying to our cans instead of asking for their last rites. Several religious figures have filed complaints (unrelated to the petition to Congress).

Addicts of entrequadras 213/214

We received a call to investigate the famous drug hotspot of the city, the entrequadras 213/214, located on the dead-end street between those two blocks. The caller described people injecting Miracle Fresh intravenously with shared needles. HR suggests we make an ad with a mildly pretty and harmless celebrity, like Betinho Gonzaga, to remind people that our slogan—’Have a miracle inside you!’—refers only to ingesting the soda. Rumors claim the first Miracle Fresh addicts already exist (unconfirmed).

Children aged 7-14

They said it tastes like grape juice.

SIX-MONTH ASSESSMENT

University students aged 18-32 (59 institutions)

Tranquility rates rose and attendance dropped dramatically as students started to abandon academia to follow a path of ‘self-peregrination’—a term apparently related to the connections they make through Miracle Fresh. They refuse to associate the process with the high (rumored) addicts get from injecting Miracle Fresh intravenously. According to reports, ‘self-peregrination’ allows a person to dive into their inner core, experience memories from their birth, and watch their organs, cells, and genes work in real time. One student insists she discovered a tumor by dint of those trips and thanked us profusely. She gifted us many more flower crowns.

Our labs found such tranquility rates rather dubious, given the world we live in, and requested further analysis. They received confirmation in a matter of hours: the cans contained one to three foreign substances that altered their composition on a molecular level. It appears students had been infusing cans of Miracle Fresh with sweat, blood, or flower essence in an effort to enhance effects. Combinations of two or all three extracts are also popular options. This corroborates Marketing’s August report regarding the need for new flavors and variations, and perhaps limited-edition holiday Miracle Freshes.

Some of the flowery extracts might be suitable options, as well as the sweat variation, if branded properly. Blood on blood, however, is out of the question: there seems to be a reaction when Miracle Fresh comes into contact with the conscious sacrifice of certain people, a phenomenon our labs decided to call ‘Midas’s blood’. This reaction transforms the blood into a golden liquid. Carriers of Midas’s blood languish little by little unless they cease all contact with Miracle Fresh. They perish in one to two months otherwise. Patient zero is yet to be identified, but our team has already announced a recall of each affected batch of the drink and is watching the diseased closely. Spirits & Co. should unveil more details about Midas’s blood soon.

Attached: Pictures and a police report from October 23rd, 2028. A truck carrying contaminated Miracle Fresh was overturned and ransacked by an unidentified group on Pistão Sul. Its contents have yet to be recovered.

The Guardians of our Holy Youth (GHY)

For the past few weeks, Customer Service has received an endless string of emails with questions regarding specifics of our product, such as how to: 1) retain blessings for longer periods of time; 2) ensure the absorption of every single drop of blood from our devoted Messiah present in each can; 3) measure the amount of ‘blessitude’ as to provide a comparison with fellow drinkers. Our labs promptly dismissed the requests, suggesting this veiled holiness contest to be out of the product scope and beseeched IT to block all of their addresses. Marketing insists we should fund a department to develop a blessing meter and turn this annoyance into profit. The matter will be brought to discussion at the next meeting.

Young influencers aged 15-21

The ‘alternative uses for Miracle Fresh’ trend died early in the third month, replaced by ‘What would the Messiah do?’ skits starring influencers dressed as our devoted Messiah, who would catch other people in awkward situations, then wail “I did not bleed for this!” Those with less comedic inclinations decided instead to try a little bit of everything. Highlights include Tito Moreno, the ‘Gordito Estrela’, who rose to fame after feeding Miracle Fresh to his dog and filming his reactions as the dog began to levitate, and Jade Martins, former blessed make-up artist.

Jade’s case is still under investigation, since her recent content consists of live streams and videos of herself posing with her face covered in golden tears, a telltale sign of Midas’s blood. The adulterated cans are likely from the truck we lost a while ago, a delicacy extremely hard to come by and with plenty of potential buyers out in the wild. I would bolt my doors if I were her. Jade has nonetheless refused to reply to any messages sent by the company, despite the warnings that she has a lethal infection and will likely be dead in a few weeks’ time. In response, IT started a betting pool on which will run out first: 1) her stash of adulterated cans; 2) her life. Anyone can join by speaking to Marlene Silva on the second floor.

Religious leaders

Our team scouted the city looking for interviewees from various backgrounds, but faced some problems, since 52% of religious buildings, including temples, terreiros, and churches, have been closed for the past three months. From those that remain operational, reactions varied: doors closed to our faces; insults that reached back to five generations; pleas to leave them alone. One priest rushed outside, kneeled before the team, kissed each of their hands, and fled without uttering a word. Some people are just difficult to please, I guess.

SUS Triad – Brasília’s main hospitals

Saint Claire Hospital: A ritual has been established before any medical procedure, which requires both patients and the medical team to drink at least one sip of Miracle Fresh for good luck. Scars and gross negligence lost meaning, despite the dead count skyrocketing. As diabetics cannot partake in this process, Marketing has proposed we accelerate the release of our sugar-free version.

Our Devoted Medical Center: We have instructed the government to refer those afflicted with Midas’s blood to ODMC. A Spirits & Co. mobile laboratory is currently posted inside the center to provide them the best care in the world and also to investigate the inner workings of the disease. Hospital employees are not allowed entry. IT is already on the lookout for any protests from human rights NGOs.

Center 1 Hospital: Miracle Fresh has replaced holy water and its counterparts during last rites. Some patients are fully bathed in the soda to guarantee their purification, including a baptism for the terminally ill. Complaints have stopped, and due to lack of available religious leaders, the last rites are often performed by family members or nurses. Marketing is analyzing the possibility of introducing Miracle Fresh as a holy water replacement during baptisms as well. This would require an adaptation of the current logo: ‘Have a miracle outside of you’ would trigger another unpleasant side of GHY, which we would rather avoid. Marketing suggested ‘The miracle is all around you’. And isn’t it?

Addicts of entrequadras 213/214

The current number of intravenous users of Miracle Fresh is not high enough to call it a drug problem yet, regardless of what the government says. As there have been no Midas’s blood sightings in the vicinity, HR suggests we hire a mildly pretty and harmless celebrity for an ad to disperse the rumors, especially those connecting us to the fallen celebrity Betinho Gonzaga. He has been seen a few blocks away from HQ and is reportedly performing circus tricks at the traffic lights for change, which he later uses to buy the shots. In any case, his agent will not sue: she is far too busy doing cartwheels around the cars while he performs.

Children aged 7-14 years

They said it still tastes like grape juice.

Recommendations

Proceed with a follow-up nine-month report.

Signed electronically by

Genevieve Aranha

Chief Manager

2228 words

Author’s Note: Miracle Fresh was inspired by a Brazilian soft drink called Guaraná Jesus that is sadly not made of Jesus. It’s actually quite sweet and, for some reason, quite pink. On Christmas this one year, after Coke released their cans with people’s names on the side, someone posted a photo of a Mary Coke and a Joseph Coke with a Guaraná Jesus in a manger, and I just knew I had to write a story about this someday. This is that day. I’m so sorry.

Anne Liberton is an autistic Brazilian author fascinated by all things weird, from fiction and poetry to people. In her spare time, she sings, studies languages, and plays with her dogs. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Diabolical Plots, Heartlines Spec, and Star*Line. She took part in the 2021 Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop. You can find her everywhere @AnneLiberton.

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

DP Fiction #104: “Like Ladybugs, Bright Spots In Your Mailbox” by Marie Croke

edited by David Steffen

Someone began sending hand-written spellcrafted postcards out of DC in July of 2024. Those postcards made the rounds for a good nine months, under the radar, scarcely observed. That was, until the rash of good health, the proliferation of wealth, and the sudden uptick in good living coupled with a grand downtick in big socioeconomic issues the mayor was quick to claim as her own—such as suicides and unemployment—brought the situation to the attention of the East US Coven.

Because we can’t have downticks in unemployment and upticks in good health, not if there’s witchery being waved under everyone’s noses. Especially if the handwriting has a particularly feminine flair. No siree.

The coven sent a team, sans me, to check DC, do a sweep that chugged them around on and off the metro until they shook their heads and scattered home, reports saying that it must be the mayor after all.

I admit, I checked the coven’s files after, a part of me rankling since the coven overlooked asking me to look into things when I was right there. But I am “just a low-level research drone.” As if my duties take away from knowing my own home over men from New York and Boston; as if it isn’t literally my job to find possible unapproved spell-usage hinted at in news articles and reports and forum threads. Talk about being low gal on the invisible corporate witchpole I’m supposed to climb.

Then the goodwill witching spread. Not like California wildfires. Like ladybugs. Crawling into people’s houses via their mailboxes, with goodness hidden under their stamps and well-wishes printed out every fourth letter in the mundane notes.

Now, I’m what you call a witchery watcher, or at least that’s what would be on my resume if Salem hadn’t happened, kicking us all deep undercover from the rest of the world. It’s not that glamorous a job, not when half the self-proclaimed witches can’t seal their bottle spells properly enough to be termed spells and the other half spend the bulk of their time insisting that spells are all internal or some new-agey form of mindfulness. But here and there someone who acts suspiciously like a real witch pops up on one of my routine checks and my job gets a tad more interesting, if you call “interesting” sitting at home while higher-ups from elsewhere snatch the file and head out into the field to hunt that wild witch down themselves.

Those days are frustrating as all heck because I’m never given authorization to use higher-level spellcraft to check out the witch dabbler myself.

See, it’s dangerous to authorize women for too much crafting on the job. Don’t want another Salem. Don’t want another witch-burning spree where the men of the covens hide behind the women, send them out to die for the good of keeping everyone else safe.

Best to make sure we don’t get noticed.

A bit of a catch-22 if you ask me, since promotions come from wild witch catching, yet if I’m never out in the field because of my supposed feminine wiles…

That mentality isn’t something I can change all at once, not craning my head as I am from the bottom of the coven.

So when I get a postcard in my mail that smells like the sage-flavored mountain on its front and spells a wealth of confidence into my spine, I decide to do some off-grid, inadvisable digging of my own. Maybe jump a few pegs up on that ladder even if I have to bend some coven rules. Get to a position where I might do some good, change the culture, move some immovable mountains so my two girls could step into a coven without having to claw for every scrap of respect they gained.

Or I hope I’d at least earn a nice letter of recommendation and some off the record shop-chat that could help me corporate-jump myself between the ladders of different covens like a game of leapfrog.

I wait till both my girls skip merrily onto bus #475, that orange monstrosity that every day I wish I could wrap in a protective blanket of spells, though that doesn’t come under the “allowable spellcraft” rules.

While the girls learn mathematics and grammar and spotty history, I craft a runic graph of my city, marking it up by feel before I rip up that confidence-spelled postcard, hold the confetti in my fist and release it over the scrawled lines representing DC. A spelled wind takes those jagged-edged pieces and swirls them over the city on my coffee table, each of them bobbing when they sailed down the Potomac, yet ultimately landing in as haphazard a way as you’d like.

I try pendulums next, cleansing each and working through the now-shredded postcard’s origins, but the crystals latch onto the stamp, dragging the pendulum toward my local post office over and over like a poor confused dog. Which meant whoever this witch is had found a way to break the trail, stop the ink, the words, the spellcraft, from trickling a wake back, back to the one who’d crafted them.

Screw it. I’ll bend the law just a tad. No holds barred.

Using sunwater to find pinprick jolts of lingering spellcraft wake where it hadn’t yet been contaminated with too much other life, I find the houses in the local neighborhoods that had been sent spellcrafted postcards recently. Reach my hand in through grandmother’s opal-glazed bowl and steal mail right off of tables and armchairs and dusty tops of refrigerators.

In a stack that thick and robust, the slightly damp postcards practically glow with a lovely residual witch-touch—a gentle turquoise with pale pink chevrons that spoke of streams of love and caring in a backdrop of creativity and friendship. My single, now-shredded card wasn’t this bright alone—just a drop in the metaphorical postal system it’d been. Whoever this witch is, they truly are a spellcrafting benefactor of tiny, prolific blessings. Blessings that are collectively wrapping their embrace around the city, stretching through Arlington, through Bethesda, reaching for Rockville and Columbia.

Like some urban, limited-word guardian angel.

I hesitate, running my fingers along those damp edges, staring at the smudged ink where every fourth letter spelled contentment, spelled hope, spelled happiness, motivation, forgiveness, love, charity, satisfaction. There is even one spelled to help find lost things. And another to accept those things that can’t be found.

This witch doesn’t need to be hunted down like some Salem echo. This witch is doing good work, witch work, the sort that means to help, to heal, to wrap warm arms about a cold people and remind them that life wasn’t the crapshoot it sometimes felt like, filled with people who only did wrong to others.

I sit with hands clasped, suffused with a sense of rightness. I would tuck these postcards away, ignore the proliferation of positivity, let this witch, whoever they are, get away with their practice under the coven’s nose because people like them are what these cities need, whether or not its citizens cared. Whether or not its citizens might run screaming if they knew.

And for a good thirty minutes, I admire my own morality. Then my girls come home with a squeal of bus brakes and a breath of chilly wind.

My youngest screams in, a ten-year-old’s strength and optimism and excitement opening up a babbling of her day, her wild curls haloing her face and the crookedness of her teeth making her smile seem wide, wider. Like the world hadn’t yet caught hold of her mind, told her to hush, hush, let the others talk.

But my oldest steps through the door a minute after, dragging her sneakers and dropping her bookbag like it weighed more than a curse, societal expectations bricking her up, squishing her down. Her dark hair wafts around her cheeks. Her eyes skip past mine. What has happened today, what words lost to the depths of her throat, what tiny infractions that seem so large to her now, yet will climb and build until she presumes them normal?

Until she finds herself working in an entry-level job under people with less skill, less craft than what she possesses in her littlest finger, yet will be unable to leap past them because rules and regs and laws all built to say no, not-yet, you-aren’t-the-right-fit have become expected. Lines she’ll sit contentedly in, obediently.

Like the box toddlers play in. Yet as a toddler, we always push against the cardboard and tip…over. Because the box is fragile, always was, until we let it turn to stone and plaster and brick around us as we grow.

I put the girls back on the bus the next morning, the grey sky cleared in splotches, like hope peeking out from a shedding blanket, though someone probably has a damn good darning needle and some thick thread and will patch those little spots up, clouds yanked in stitches until the holes shrink to nothingness.

But I can’t think like that.

I’ve got spells in my back pocket. A little bottle, filled with postcard confetti and scrying water and intentions, all sealed with a black wax meant to enhance and reflect the witch-touch so the spell might be powerful enough to react to wakes and fresher castings. A small notebook page, folded and folded and folded again until I’ve got a puzzle with protective words written in sixteen different languages, fifteen of which I don’t speak, that will make me hard to remember. A watch from my childhood—yellow bumblebees on its scratched band—that saves up seconds, seven of them to be exact, that I might replay them in need.

I head to my local post office to begin my chase of the witch’s wake, the air thick about me, expectant. The bottle spell for finding things that don’t want to be found grows invisible tendrils about my body, reaching for hints to scarf down, swallow and exaggerate so that I might trail. A good little nose, I’d once been called by some middle management guy from Baltimore. No better than a dog—stick me in a kennel when I’m not needed, why don’t you.

I shook my head, removing that conglomerate, insidious voice that attempted to shunt me down the ladder. Climbed the steps into the brick building, the scent of paper thickening, the scent of spellcraft billowing.

Little metal boxes with their little metal locks block me in on all sides. A witch might have a day in here, snapping up the power numbers, every box that ends in seven, every thirteen that winks with untapped potential, every three growing warm at my presence. I let my finding spell reach and search, sifting through the air, tasting it with suckers no one else can see.

All that billowing spellcraft, streams of wakes where postcards have swept up and away and into and out of postal boxes congregates here, then parts there, disappears here, then solidifies there. In flux, throbbing, like…the craft is being constantly worked in pockets and moments, nothing too big all at once, but everything small all the time.

I step up toward the counter. And pause.

Of course. There she is. Not quite as powerful a witch as I thought, her wake stopping here because here is where she crafts.

She reminds me of my own mother, the way her poinsettia-patterned dress clings to her, the way her thick glasses sit on the bridge of her nose, the way she chats with the man in front of me, telling him all about grandchildren, all about life. As she passes him the receipt she tells him not to save his smiles because like cookies, they go bad if you don’t pass them out. Can’t save them all for oneself, you can’t, she says.

For just a moment, I see all that effort she’s gone through, handwriting each message, licking every stamp, pressing her witch-touch as she casts the small spells with a hope in her heart that they make someone smile, or give them the little bounce they need to make a fresh choice or be content with an old one.

The man brushes past me with a light in his dark eyes, like there’s a chevron pink flame flickering in those depths.

Then I’m breathing hard.

I think—I thought this would be easier. My fingers slick with sweat as I tug off my glove, press the contact list, find my coven boss’s number. I think—I thought I’d had resolve. I’m just doing what’s necessary to claw my way up that witchpole, lay claim to little scraps of power that I’m thrown. That’s all.

That’s all.

My phone comes down, down to my side. She smiles at me, handing out joy like a freshly-baked cookie, like she can’t see the finding spell eagerly wrapping about her, pointing as if I hadn’t already figured her out. Realization flickers in her eyes and that smile flattens out.

I could hold my hand out, introduce myself, wish her well on her crusade. I could find a kindred spirit maybe, that reflects back on the days I sat with my mother while she taught me runes and wax and scrying.

Instead, I reach to my back pocket and rewind seven seconds, take back her smile, take back the man brushing past me. Back, back, to when my folded paper spell still worked to make me forgettable.

Then, as the man begins to turn away anew, I turn as well, escape out into the street, away from the little metal boxes and all the postcards they may or may not hide.

There, with the patched-up grey sky thickening overhead, I make the call. My breathing steady. My heartrate normal. Because sometimes we have to do things we don’t like, yeah, things that jump us up that witchpole.

That’s what I tell myself, over and over, as I walk home to meet the girls off the bus. That’s what I tell them when we sit around the table. Tell them that sometimes, in order to keep our jobs, keep ourselves safe, keep food on the table and inch the world into something different, something that might be better, we’ve got to work within the confines of the rules we were born into. Inside the box.

I just don’t tell them how much it costs.

When my coven comes—two men from New York and a third from Atlanta—I try not to think of the woman like my mother. Try to think about her like she’s an unknowing martyr, a witch for the cause so that the covens stand tall, that I might wind my way up to wield true power, make a difference one day. It’s a long game. Long.

Like how they thought of Salem. All those woman pulled and burned that the covens might stand…

I’m on the email chain as they wrap up the “DC Postcard Witch.” There’s no mention of the higher school grades or the lower unemployment those postcards had wrought. There’s just a withering in the air, the sky crying for a week as the postcards are fading, fading, gone.

And I…

I take my tiny back pat. My off-brandvacuum-cleaner reward. My paper commendation that crinkles in my desk at home, buried under my daughters’ honor roll cardstock print-outs.

I go back to my researching duties, reading, filing, emailing, typing Johns and Steves and Adams in the “To” boxes. I find evidence of possible witchery occurring outside of the Coven’s know-how and approval. I field question after question on how a spell works, what they might be doing wrong from people who work in positions higher than me and should already know. I fix, I tweak, I make everyone above me look good, because that’s what they say will make me look good too.

Except it doesn’t. Nothing changes. That witchpole looks the same from down here. And my city, it looks all the worse.

The upticks become downticks and the downticks morph into upticks. My youngest begins to have a smidge of that same sagging weight to her steps as my oldest. The dinner table talks become rote, become painful because I can’t believe in the shit I’m spitting out anymore.

So I stop saying anything at all.

And I start doing.

Someone begins to send spellcraft postcards from DC in September 2025, during the season the ladybugs start searching for warmth, encroaching into homes, red specks crawling pentagrams across ceilings, insect runecraft, the sort the big covens would shut down the moment they sniffed competition. Because that’s all this has ever been about, stomping the competition before women might claw their way back, swell their small-coven ranks, show the world that witchery wasn’t about profits and rules and big power, but about small powers, about hopes and futures outside of confinements.

They’ll come for me too one of these days.

Maybe the winter of 2027, when the cold that creaks through ragged carpet is defrosted by a few tropical words spelled out every 4th letter. Maybe during the height of the summer in 2028, when the breeze contained under flag stamps is a little more inclusive as it breathes soothing messages through the worst of the season. Maybe not until 2035, when I’m finally eligible to apply for a managerial position in the coven–fifteen years of dedicated service and all–when they tune their eyes closer, check every nook and cranny of my life, overturn the rocks and stamps to find the gentle spells I’d released en masse to those in most need.

And then maybe my girls will nod a few decades on, saying their mother did something, yeah. Something that made a difference. Something that maybe would spread like ladybugs, happy bright spots, little, little, but proliferating nonetheless.

2967 words

Marie Croke is an award-winning fantasy and science-fiction writer living in Maryland with her family, all of whom like to scribble messages in her notebooks when she’s not looking. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and her stories can be found in over a dozen magazines, including Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Zooscape, Cast of Wonders, Diabolical Plots, and Fireside. She has worked as a slush editor and first reader for multiple magazines, including khōréō and Dark Matter, and her reviews can be found in Apex Magazine. Her hobbies include crochet, birding, and aerial dance.

For more of Marie Croke’s work in Diabolical Plots, check out “Delivery For 3C at Song View”. If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #103B: “Requiem” by P.H. Low

edited by David Steffen

Don’t you understand? I only ever wanted to make you proud.

***

This is dawn: fields shading from black to grey, flicker-fading starlight, our voices raised against the wind and the red scarves whipping our faces. Our song levitates us ten feet in the air, above dirt roads packed down by wagon wheels and chariots: Carl Lang’s Canter, an ode to unseen horses and sunrise and longing. When we sing—as long as we sing—our feet do not touch the ground.

The town in which we finally stumble back to earth is a tiny nest of weathered homesteads: cows collared with slow-tolling bells, a rooster’s crow, the smoke of yesterday’s fires a thin scrape against the air. A wooden pole stands in the main square, dark with carvings—poems, its makers would claim, never songs. I have seen dozens like it, windblown as excuses.

We surround the faded house to which Maestro has directed me, shivering against the wind. The sky teeters on the brink of rose and indigo; in the rising light, our robes glow like ghosts.

“For the Great Sound.”

I raise my gloved hands against the cold. Seven pairs of eyes meet mine—an octet, two singers for each voice part. Each of us newly minted lieutenants, eager to prove to the Empire our worth.

“For the Great Sound,” they murmur in turn, and adrenaline arches through my body.

I was born for this. Have trained all eighteen years of my life for this.

I sing our starting notes—a high clear D minor triad, no pitch pipes, not with us—and our voices call down fire.

***

This town. One of the Emperor’s spies heard a violin, its sweet unmistakable lilt escaping through the crack in a window, laughter muffled but not silenced by cold stone walls. The instrument itself is not strictly outlawed—only voices bend the earth, the air—but where there is a tune, there are songs, and where there are songs—

Foolish, these people. It has been a hundred years. They should have known.

***

We learn four songs for fire, one for every two years we spend in the Conservatory.

Ember, to warm.

Spark, to illuminate.

Flare, to signal.

Inferno, to destroy.

We discover, today, that the Inferno blazes red as the brightening sky.

I discover, today, that I can hear the violinist’s screams as she burns, even through her walls.

***

We touch down before the Conservatory wall as blush-streaked clouds pearl to white, our robes still dusted with ash. We could sing them clean, of course, and we do, for performances. But this is different: this is the blood streaked on the sheets of a first wedding night, this is the battle scar lanced across a once-soft hand, this is our only trophy when traitor and house have burned to ground.

“I hate when we hear them.” The second tenor—Cas. He leans into his roommate as we pass beneath the Conservatory’s marble watchtowers; the fog of their exhales curl into a single creature.

“Why?” I ask, and the two of them stiffen in tandem, feet lifting a beat too long. “The town is better off now than it was before.”

“You’re Hanwa,” the roommate tries—eyes lingering too long on my black hair, my olive-toned skin—and shrivels under my glare.

“The Empire honors all who serve it.” I stride back to barracks ahead of them, my red scarf flashing behind me, and hum the first few phrases of Inferno—my part only, and therefore harmless—over and over.

***

I wonder if you blame yourself.

I wonder if you think that first piano a mistake: the chipped ivory greyed with sweat and age, the wooden contraptions you strapped around my feet so that, at age four, I could work the pedals but not walk away from the bench. I wonder if you regretted sending me to the church elder who twisted my ears, or the sawdust-grubbed coins you slipped into his pockets as I pounded my fists on the piano bench and screamed.

I will not blame you. There is no fault to be found in a dark man in a pale empire, who only wanted the best for his daughter.

But what did you expect, stranger in a strange land? What did you think would happen?

When the soldiers came, whose song did you think I would sing?

***

“Bravo, Vitka,” Maestro tells me, one hand on my shoulder. Our steps echo off fluted columns, the wide marble hallway with its blue pools of floored sunlight, and my breath catches again—the Darbaum Conservatory, and I am inside, eye to eye with its commanding officer, addressed by the Imperial name I chose. “Cas tells me the house was but a smudge of ash by the time you were done.”

At least that boy gave credit where credit was due. “Yes, sir.”

We walk shoulder to shoulder through the mahogany double doors, thrown open to fresh winter air, then down the sweeping staircase. Maestro’s epaulets glint red and gold—four stripes like a future.

“There is talk,” he says, “of your company touring this season.”

A second dawn blooms in my chest. “Is there?”

He looks at me sideways. “I’m only telling you what I’ve heard.”

Darbaum has twenty companies of fully trained Kor, nearly two hundred voices. Ours is one of the smaller ones, but we never needed to be many, only the best. I would know—I chose them myself. I incline my head. “We would not be worthy of such an honor.”

At the base of the staircase, we pause. An old man stoops beside the adjoining road, robed in brown. A stranger, not a soldier, whom the guards have somehow allowed through.

When he looks up, his eyes widen, and he calls me by my Hanwa name.

***

No.

That man is not you. That man—bony-shouldered, twig-thin arms, white wisps of hair strewn over balding shine—cannot be you.

“You,” he says, his outstretched finger trembling, and I sing of crushed lungs and fleeing air until he sinks to his knees.

***

I do not kill him.

I do not kill him, because the Empire has not yet decreed it, because it is not my place to decide whether he is deserving of life or death.

I only let him fall, and as a couple second-years drag him away, grey robes fluttering, I watch Maestro’s eyes crinkle into a smile.

The stranger dies later, in the infirmary, fists clutched to his heart.

***

Again, you said, your breath heavy on the back of my neck.

Again.

There were never any blisters on my fingers—only an ache in my wrists and elbows, fear charring ash on the back of my tongue. I always got it right ten repetitions too late: ten lashes, two more hours stiffening on the cold bench, wincing every time I didn’t reach high enough.

Again, you said, and I watched a tear slip silver between the keys, burning a new vein like weakness. And I think, now, that you had no song but this: the shout and the lash, your arm weighted with all the lives you never lived; your insistence, in this country where you were suddenly nothing, that I live them all instead.

***

Crimson curtains rise on a mahogany-paneled amphitheater, a sea of silent faces. The Empire does not like to loose its hold over political prisoners, even after the labor camps; our people are too weak to handle the truth of governing, and rebellions may spark at a few overwrought stories.

And so: this room, velvet-swathed and trimmed with gilt, the prisoners’ wrists bound to their chairs and lined up like an offering. Pink trails leaking out of their mouths, from tongues excised by sixth-years in grey.

I raise my arms, hum an A and then D-sharp: the devil’s interval.

Song of Dissolution is dangerous even in pieces—we have only ever rehearsed in twos or threes, lest the world begin to twist—but in its fullness, every part will slip between three others at a time, echoing, amplifying, modulating. Accidentals will fall like stones in a stream—ripple through the main thread until the entire melody shifts, pulsing and perfect, and dissolves every living thing within its parameters to sand.

No one ever leaves this song alive—sometimes, if they’re not careful, even its singers.

Cas’s gaze meets mine. Behind him, another five hundred glares, heavy with apprehension. My palms tingle; my throat pulls taut. Ghost tongues lick the shells of my ears.

Behind me, I hear my Hanwa name.

The amphitheater goes liquid and slow, my hands frozen in the sign of universal surrender. Beyond the stage, half a thousand souls suck in the last oxygen they will ever breathe, blood sliding acrid down their throats.

Focus. One slipped note and the song’s power will ricochet. We will have to start over, if we have not already crumbled to powder—begin again and again until the fabric of the world bows, burns.

I hold the F-sharp behind my tongue. My pulse roars.

I am Kor, I tell myself. I am unbreakable.

My hands rise of their own accord, the old dance beaten into their bones, and on the count of four they fall like blades.

***

You arranged that first and only gathering—gathering, not a performance, because performances were events attended only by the Emperor and his entourage and cause for execution for anyone else. This gathering only a wind-beaten barn on a hillside, steeped in sunlight and old hay; the blacksmith’s sons grunting the piano up the hill as I stood quietly under a blossoming redbud. Only the slow plink of other children’s attempts, their mothers’ dry coughs and light clapping after.

And then. Then. The creak of the old bench, the linen rustle of my new white frock, and my hands danced across the keys as if they had been born knowing, and this was my language: not the stilted sounds I forced out in the schoolhouse, swamped by boys’ laughter and tainted with every word you spoke to me; not my head ducked in silence as the town ladies pursed their painted lips.

This, dark wings curled inside my ribcage. This, singing out of my hands.

No one would quite meet my eyes, after.

You must be twice as good, you said, and I was. I was.

***

Our octet sings of autumn: leaves red as proclamations, sun sunk cold beneath turning ground, high hills sharp with the melancholy of coming snow. It is a melody to tug at your heart and your bones; to take you apart, particle by particle, until all that is left of you is dust.

The prisoners listen, impassive at first. Then Ana slides into the arc of a soprano solo, the rest of us fading on a minor triad, and the darkness loosens like a sigh.

My hands, conducting, go still. From the seats, sand drifts upward, snow-soft, glittering under the lights. Hands disintegrate to nubs, pull out of manacles—except by the time the first man thinks to flee, he has no feet to stand on, then no calves, no knees.

Their eyes are the last to go: pinpricks of light, inscrutable as stars. Some of them, perhaps, the same brown as mine.

When we finish, quiet fills the amphitheater like a sunlit afternoon. Sweat gleams on our foreheads; my throat is a dry scrubland. I meet my singers’ eyes one at a time. We survived. We survived.

Then Cas, the idiot, chuckles—and we fall to our knees, howling with a laughter that should not be.

***

Maestro meets me outside the green room. His hair is dusted white—the third-years’ clean-up Whirlwind not terribly precise yet—but his uniform is starched ceremony-sharp.

“The Council would like to hear you in Kelsburg,” he says, both hands clasping mine, and a strange vertigo twists inside me, as if I have left my body. “They’ve commissioned a new octet from Carl Lang. Mountains and Night Sky. Absolutely sublime.”

The old man’s face ghosts the edge of my vision, his eyes flashing a warning. No.

But he has no power over me. Not anymore.

“Perfect,” I say, and smile so hard it hurts.

***

The morning after the gathering, the soldiers came to our town.

Flash of white at my bedroom window, song trailing the air like the first breath of summer, and I slammed out the door, my heart a bird thumping between my ribs.

“Take me with you,” I shouted, and my voice slapped the walls of other houses, cracked through my neighbors’ open windows. The blacksmith’s curtains flicked. I didn’t care. “I’m ten, I play the piano, my father wants me to go to university for it but I’d rather learn to sing—”

The Kor stopped in midair.

Two towering pillars of white, golden hair and eyes of lightest ice. Angels, I couldn’t help but think, come to answer the prayer sung by my hands.

“How old did you say you were?” the one to my right asked, and even their voice was a melody.

I lifted my chin. “Ten.”

“Then we will have you tested for the Conservatory.”

They did not ask my name. One of them nodded over my shoulder—to you, stooped in the shadows of the house, the lines of your face deepened with many hours beneath the sun. You, who had seen me run; who were already stooping under the weight of having raised a traitor.

You touched your interlaced fingers to your forehead in the old manner—I had seen you, some nights, thus salute the shrine in the corner of our bedroom—and bowed.

“Do as you wish,” you said softly, your mouth moving as if you knew some poem, some song, that would not gutter out like a candle in the sweep of the Empire’s storm. You did not look me in the eye. “Be good, child.”

You did not say my name, either.

“I will,” I said solemnly, my feet already turned toward my saving angels, and I meant it, and it was that easy.

***

Curtains rise on arches of stone. Chandeliers slant the walls amber, paint the air honey-thick. This is the Kelsburg Cathedral: a marvel of marble and glass, a prism of glitter when the earth turns toward dawn. Premiere stage for the Great Sound, and for us.

Our audience is eager this time—all powdered wigs and lush velvet cloaks, song-paled faces and bosoms crooned to voluptuousness.

“Sing!” they cry as we circle onstage, our white robes glowing from recent serenade. “Sing!” As if our voices could not kill them in a minute. As if they are not playing with fire.

But we can sing beauty, too, and Mountains and Night Sky carries us to the top of the Empire’s highest peak, the Milky Way flung high into the dark. Out beyond the velvet folds of sound, someone begins to weep.

Come back, you say, and then you are standing beside me on the peak, hand outstretched, and it’s really you this time: dark-haired, broad-shouldered, your mouth hardened the way it did when my fingers slipped yet again on the keys. This is not what I wanted for you.

The song wraps me in gossamer, a silken swath of stars. I keep conducting; my voice skims along roads I have paved in midnight rehearsals and traveled in dreaming. If I stop now, the illusion will wither, cast us as a company of fools. And there is Darbaum to consider: we will not be the first of its graduates to have slipped a note, but Maestro will know, and everyone listening. The school will lose face.

Not now, I think, but you shake your head.

You don’t know what they will ask of you next.

My throat moves in reply. Spit shoots down the wrong path, and shock lances my fists as I choke, try to swallow, breathe, breathe—

Instead, I cough, and the stars break.

***

“Vitka,” Maestro says, and his eyes are so kind. Cas stands silent and knowing behind me; a crimson bandage wraps Ana’s ear where the thwarted song lashed out mid-phrase. “Are you all right?”

Sleet spatters our foreheads. We are huddled outside the cathedral, cold seeping through the cracks in our boots, waiting for a carriage. No songs of unseen horses now—the rest of the company is too afraid to try.

The people dashing past us to ice-slick carriages pay us no mind, as if we have become one with the sopping hedges.

I raise my chin. My throat is dry, now. My knuckles warm with the echo of fingers wrapped around mine.

You used to hold my hand, when we walked into town. As if you could keep me safe.

“Yes, sir,” I say.

Maestro’s gaze flicks to my scarf, and it is my turn to be afraid. “Good.”

***

The next week, Maestro tells me of a whole town, singing. The Empire’s command: Inferno in the broadest parameters we’ve ever cast, a mile-wide radius of destruction.

No, you say, as I grin.

Yes.

***

We sing, we break.

Grandhalls crumble; horse-drawn carriages stagger and burn. A treasonous composer collapses in his ivory tower; seditious dukes gasp their last breaths in Oslar, drowned in oceans of sound and fury. Nobles stop to greet us in the Conservatory halls; Maestro begins to smile once more.

With every song, I tongue the fear at the back of my throat and vow: never again.

But even so. Even so. Your face darts through the fringes of my dreams. Your gravity bends me in an arc around your will. Your voice plunges into the soft place beneath my sternum; slashes down, spilling warmth.

And I feel myself crumble, hourglass-slow, into the shape you always wanted me to be.

So I sing louder. I break faster and for an hour, a day, I drown you out.

***

Our last stop is the Emperor’s palace, Mountains and Night Sky ghosting our inner ears alongside a new commission from the Emperor himself. This stage is its own world—colored glass threads the high beams, wrist-thin stone columns shoot up to a high crimped ceiling; as we arrange ourselves for sound check, sing a few experimental phrases, I think about the time you rode the carriage with me to Hettgart University, folded your hands as I craned my head up at centuries-old frescoes. The Emperor’s commission today is just that: Glory. An alto-tenor duo like a herald-march of trumpets, bass lines austere and forbidding as mountains touched with winterlight. Broken midway, its parameters incomplete, the song will whiplash as utter void.

B, D-sharp, F-sharp. My absolute pitch does not fail me. My hands do not shake as they rise. The eight of us breathe in together and soar from phrase to phrase, harmonies bloomed spring-bright and sparkling with dew.

Halfway through—a golden swell beneath my ribcage, clean scent of ocean, the Emperor’s distant inhale like a catching sob—your voice blows warm in my ear.

I love you.

You know that, right?

My throat closes.

In the silence, I watch my hands fall.

***

I love you.

I don’t know if you did. If you do. I don’t know if this weight you thought was love simply failed to translate, or how much of your strength was desperation, or whether it was a thing you used to know, the way one learns a poem by heart and then loses it to the slow grind of time. I don’t know if I can forgive you for once holding my hand, or myself for needing you to.

Only this: that I was never your promise to keep. That my future was never yours to bequeath me. That you wanted, and I ran, and maybe our need outpaced both of us—yours to sing through me, mine to be more than your song.

But I was always going to be your daughter. I could never have run away.

***

This time, when the song recoils, it shoots straight for my heart. As if it knows.

3308 words

P. H. Low is a Rhysling-nominated Malaysian American writer and poet with work published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Fantasy Magazine, and Death in the Mouth: Original Horror By People of Color, among others. P. H. attended Viable Paradise in 2019 and participated in Pitch Wars in 2021, and can be found online at ph-low.com and on Twitter and Instagram @_lowpH.

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DP FICTION #102B: “Shalom Aleichem” by Y.M. Resnik

edited by Ziv Wities

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?

I was definitely not crying as I gripped my kiddush cup and sang Shalom Aleichem. The song, sung on faith in most Jewish households, welcomes home the invisible angels that accompany those returning from synagogue every Friday night. Except thanks to some particular genetic gift—or curse, I’m still not sure—my family could see them. Making it impossible for me to pretend that a whole host of angels was keeping me company.

You should go to the Hillel and hang out with actual people. That girl Mara who invited you after psych class seemed pretty nice.

The wine sloshed over my fingers as I jumped up, frantically searching for the origin of the disembodied comment. By some small miracle I’d been given a single as a freshman. A swift peek under the twin bed and a glance into the sorry excuse of a closet confirmed I was still the sole occupant.

Which meant that in addition to hiding the fact that I saw things others couldn’t, I was now going to have to hide the fact that I was having auditory hallucinations.

Or you could tell people. Maybe they’ll think it’s cool that you see angels. Like that woman on the talk shows.

My head nearly snapped on my neck as I twisted around the room. I definitely did not hallucinate that statement. I didn’t watch talk shows. “Who the fuck are you, and why are you messing with me?”

I began tearing the place apart, searching for a hidden transmitter or some piece of surveillance equipment left here by a previous occupant with a twisted sense of humor. Campus security had a lot of explaining to do.

“I hope you get expelled, you creepy-ass son of a bitch,” I muttered as I pried off the ceiling tiles.

Had I come here with my own guardian angel, they would have taken care of this for me. None of my siblings had to worry about illegal dorm room surveillance.

Wait. Hold up. You can hear me?

“Of course I can hear you, you perv. Now tell me who the fuck you are.” I had zero hopes of getting them to confess, but if I kept them talking I might be able to locate the source of the sound.

Uhm. I’m your guardian angel. Sorry it took me so long to figure out a way to communicate. Didn’t realize humans were set up for telepathy.

My head hit the ceiling and a rain of plaster paint chips littered my mattress. I let go of the ceiling and dropped down to the floor in a crouch like a feral cat.

“Spying is gross, but messing with my religion is crossing a line. I will find out who you are and I will end you.”

There was a scratchy sort of laughter that I still could not pin down to a location.

When you were ten your friends dared you to jump off the tire swing at summer camp. You should have fractured your ankle but you only sprained it. Because I caught you.

I blinked. It was true enough, but hospitals kept records. Computers were easily hacked. And more to the point: angels don’t speak, at least not any angel I ever met, and I’d met my fair share. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

A sigh followed, pregnant with embarrassment.

You got your first period on a class trip to the Statue of Liberty. You were wearing a pair of white shorts. Luckily you found a pair of cut-offs and a maxi pad in your backpack. You’re welcome.

“Fuck.” I swallowed the kiddush wine in one gulp. The period fiasco was the most embarrassing story of my existence, a memory I did not dwell on often. I hadn’t even thanked my mother, who I had assumed packed the items, because that’s what mothers did. Wasn’t it?

Believe me now?

I nodded mutely and seized the wine, taking a swig straight from the bottle. Never before had I wished Manischewitz had a higher alcohol content. “So why can’t I see you?”

There was a cough but nothing else.

“You got a name?”

Still nothing.

This, unfortunately, also corroborated the whole telepathic angel story, because the celestial beings are also secretive bastards. They congregate very nicely amongst themselves from what I can tell, but God forbid they should ever communicate anything to a human straight out. For instance, my cousin Chana spent years wondering why her angel had a bare patch on its wings until her own alopecia showed up and her angel happily showed her that beauty did not have to take a standard form to be any less divine.

I set the bottle down. I did not like to think what my angel being invisible said about me.

“You got social anxiety too, or are you just trying to help me with mine?”

How about we hit up that Hillel and try talking to Mara? I think she likes you.

My reasons for wincing at the suggestion were fourfold. One, this non-answer was more than enough confirmation that my fear of social situations had turned my angel invisible. Two, Mara’s angel had been breathtakingly gorgeous. Three, Mara was even prettier than the angel, and I hadn’t managed to stutter out a single word when she invited me to join her at the campus Hillel for Friday night dinner. Four, my angel knew I was queer. A fact I had only recently acknowledged myself.

Well, that didn’t leave me much choice.

I grabbed my coat and fished the flier for the Hillel dinner out of my back pocket. Because there was no way in hell I was sitting here in this depressing-as-fuck dorm room, chatting about my newfound lesbianism with an angel that spoke directly into my head.

“I hope this makes you happy.”

Hell yeah! We’re going out!

***

I hated to admit it, but the Hillel crowd was pretty chill. An assistant Rabbi welcomed me at the door, handed me a prayer book, and then left me to my own devices for services. As soon as I selected a seat in the back of the sanctuary, Mara slid into the space next to me.

Her angel perched behind her, all statuesque six foot three of her. I knew she was a “her” because her molten gold cogs all whirred to the left, but everything else about her was entirely novel. Including her iridescent, rainbow feathers, a waterfall of sparkling colors. The urge to reach out and stroke one of the pastel plumes was so strong I sat on my hands.

Looking at Mara did not improve the situation. Her brown hair was held up in a ponytail, revealing a dusting of freckles across her nose and a pair of heavily lashed hazel eyes. She was freaking adorable and sitting so close I could smell her green apple body wash. Plus, she was whispering about how she thought our psych class should focus more on the ethical issues behind the classic experiments we were studying.

So basically, she was cute, outgoing and had a moral compass. I was so screwed. There was no way I could look at her or her ridiculously toned rainbow angel. Which left me staring numbly at my prayer book, for lack of other options.

Services were coming to an end and I hadn’t managed to say anything more than “Shabbat shalom” to Mara, who was now leading me like a stray puppy towards the rows of dinner tables. Apparently, she was a sophomore and on the Hillel board this year. Maybe she was associating with my lowly freshman self as some sort of outreach.

Or maybe she likes you.

I snorted. Of course, my angel decided to show up at the most inconvenient of times. Where had they been during services? There was so much I didn’t know. I couldn’t even see their cogs to figure out their gender.

“Is there… some kind of name I should call you, or something?”

Mara paused her chatter about Hillel activities to stare at me. Crap. In my confusion over my nameless angel, I’d forgotten to communicate using my brain and not my mouth.

Her freckled nose scrunched. “Just Mara is fine. I don’t have any nicknames. But I bet you do. Eleanor Elizabeth is kind of long.”

I cringed. Eleanor Elizabeth was the legal name my parents put on my birth certificate so that people wouldn’t stumble over the Hebrew name. Mara must have heard it during roll call, and I was too shitty a conversationalist to have thought to introduce myself.

“Eli,” I blurted out. “Short for Elisheva Leah.”

It was the longest string of words I’d put together in her presence, and to my extreme relief, she appeared to find this acceptable.

She handed me a small plastic shot glass full of kiddush wine as the Rabbi led the group of students in the usual Friday night songs.

“We’ll, I’m glad you came, Eli,” she said. “I was nervous you wouldn’t. Like maybe I was being annoying pressing that flier on you.”

I shook my head no so vehemently I almost spilled my glass. The fact that I had already downed half a bottle of Manischewitz in my room did not help matters. Fortunately, I was spared having to say anything by the start of Shalom Aleichem. Mara joined in the singing with gusto, her voice a powerful soprano that soared above all the others.

Holy shit, that girl can sing. Way better than you.

My angel began singing along, which was mildly preposterous given the song was supposed to be sung by the humans welcoming the angels and not vice versa, but I didn’t want to be a downer, so I chose to focus on Mara instead of commenting.

Her voice reached out to the far corners of the room and embraced every person in it, making them feel warm and invited. She should be recruitment chair. I would come back every week just to listen.

“You sing really well.” It was the dorkiest compliment known to humanity, and as a pick up line it left a lot to be desired, but I was proud of myself for speaking. Small victories and all that.

“Thanks,” Mara said, beaming at me. “I can’t resist a good harmony. Your angel has the most fantastic alto.”

What. The. Fuck.

I’m not sure who thought it first, but my angel and I were clearly in sync. I prepared to deny all knowledge of celestial beings and the angel at my side unleashed a string of curse words so extensive I began to wonder if they were the ghost of some long-dead drunken sailor rather than a holy messenger of God.

Mara was blushing through her freckles, her face so red it resembled the kiddush wine.

“I should not have said that.” She edged away from me. “I promise I am not hallucinating. It’s, like, a family thing. Never mind. Pretend I didn’t say anything.”

Which was exactly what I had been thinking back in my dorm room. I’d always wondered if there were other families that could see the angels. But I’d never thought to wonder if there were families that could hear them.

It was too enticing a possibility to pass up, so I decided to ignore my instincts, and the vehement protestations of my very own angel, screaming in my head that discoursing with Mara on the nature of angels would convince her I was having a mental breakdown. We were making inroads, having an actual conversation, and we’d somehow reached a point where talking about angels seemed the way to not scare her off.

“You can hear them?” I asked. “You would’ve come in handy when I was a kid. Because I can only see them. Except mine is invisible and we have to communicate telepathically.”

The last line was the Manischewitz talking, because while the first bit might have passed muster, nobody wanted to hang out with the chick that casually mentioned brain invasion at Friday night dinner before the challah had been passed around. Fuck.

“Oh my God.” Mara grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the back of the room. “I thought it was just my family. We all hear them. And it got so lonely when I came to college that I started coming to Hillel just to listen to everyone’s angels. Only yours has the most wonderful voice so I couldn’t help but approach you in class. I’m not usually that forward. Can you really not hear it?”

I shook my head no. “I can only see them. And, uhm, yours is really gorgeous. Which is why I’ve been having some trouble talking to you. It’s very distracting.”

So was the fact that Mara herself was very gorgeous, but given that she was staring at me like I had three heads, I decided to omit that part.

“What do you mean, ‘my angel’?”

I blinked at her, then shifted my eyes over to her angel, who was fluttering those glittered wings in my direction flirtatiously, as if acknowledging my compliment.

“You know,” I said. “The giant rainbow-winged girl with spheres within spheres for a face that is standing behind us, currently winking about half of her three hundred eyes at me?”

Mara shook her head. “One, is that what they really look like? And two, I don’t have an angel. I hear everyone else’s, but my entire life, not a single peep for me.”

There ensued a tremendous shuffling of wings and rolling of eyes from the angel. None of which I could interpret. I sat back, trying to figure out my next move. If Mara’s angel didn’t talk to her, how was I supposed to convince her that her angel existed? It was clearly frustrating them both. Not to mention completely messing with my ability to ascertain whether Mara was interested in dating girls. Or, you know, me.

Um. It’s because. Well. Her angel can’t talk. My angel’s fumbling thought hit me with the force of a tsunami, guilting me right out of the daydream in which Mara and I were a couple by the time midterms hit.

You have to help them, Elisheva.

God must have a seriously shitty sense of humor.

I peeked over at Mara, gauging how best to break the news before deciding to just go ahead and rip off the band-aid. “So, uhm, you kind of do have an angel. A really fantastic glitter- and rainbow-covered dream of an angel. Only you can’t hear her because she can’t speak to humans. She was born without that ability.”

“Shit.” Mara’s eyes tripled in size, like two hazel searchlights, before she blushed red again. “Not shit in a bad way. Shit in a ‘I am so excited, by the way what’s your name, and I do not care if you cannot talk, but please find a way to communicate with me’ kind of way.”

Her ponytail swished as she swung her head around searching for the angel. I risked touching her cheek to steer her in the direction of the extremely sheepish-looking angel who I swear might have been crying out of all her eyes.

Her name is Ora. Maybe we can get them in on this angel-to-human telepathy thing.

I suppose it worked for me and the invisible wonder. But it had taken ages for my angel to make that breakthrough, and I still had no idea how I was managing my half of it. Maybe my angel could teach Ora, but would I need to instruct Mara? Without knowing what I was doing? This sounded like a serious group undertaking, like we’d all need to spend a significant amount of time together. Which suited me just fine, but I didn’t want to force it on Mara, or Ora.

“Her name is Ora.” I said, feeling it was imperative to convey at least this much. “If you’re OK with me being around you a lot, then my angel can try and teach yours how to communicate with you telepathically. If she wants.”

I held up a hand as Mara opened her mouth, face so bright there was no doubt she was about to say yes. Better she should know what she was getting into.

“My angel is invisible because I have severe social anxiety. You don’t need to tell me why your angel can’t talk. I will never ask. I just wanted you to know that.”

Mara laughed, a sound like pure joy manifested. “Because it’s something nobody would know about her right away. Not even the other angels. Otherwise one of them would have told me before now. They just assumed we were getting along perfectly.” She reached under her shirt and slowly pulled out a little metal box.

“Just like you wouldn’t know I have diabetes, type 1,” she said. Her fingers traced the contours of the box before she spoke again. “This is my insulin pump. I’ve had it since I was five, and I’ve shown it to some friends, but with each new person that’s a choice I have to make. You never know what their reaction will be, so it takes a lot of trust. I am overjoyed with my angel and the fact that she trusts me enough to share with me right now. I am also thrilled to have a telepathy mentor with social anxiety and an angel who is apparently double-invisible. What’s your name, by the way?”

There was a sigh in my brain, and apparently Mara heard something too because her face balled up.

“Oh, I see.” She turned to me without preamble. “Your angel doesn’t technically have a name. They would very much like one, but they’ve been too afraid to appear before God for the naming ceremony. Much like you and your social anxiety, only for a different reason. They ask you to promise not to freak out.”

It must be something incredibly unique if they felt the need to go through Mara and not ask me themselves. Still, they were my angel and they put up with my crap on a daily basis. The least I could do was reciprocate. Plus, Ora was nodding at least three of her spheres towards me, the left tilt of their twirling speeding up in her excitement.

“I promise.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth than my angel appeared before me, and if I thought Ora was distinct, then my angel was something spectacular. They had wings buffed to a high gloss in a tiger stripe pattern and hundreds of eyes that weirdly resembled mine, but their cogs were a blur of motion. The spheres tilted right and left, diagonal, backwards, forwards, in a dizzying array of motion the likes of which had never graced any angel that I had ever met. It was always left for the females, right for the males. But mine was everything and nothing all at once.

Oh. Shit.

“You don’t have a name because you were afraid God would misgender you?”

They nodded again, hanging their ever-spinning head to the point where I wanted to rush over and hug them tight.

I hope you aren’t disappointed. Maybe you can give me a name instead.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” This time I did hug them, hoping the rest of the Hillel crowd was too focused on the Rabbi’s speech to notice the girl in the back grabbing onto thin air and bawling her eyes out.

“I am so not disappointed. Being assigned to you because we’re both queer is way better than being assigned to you because I have social anxiety.”

Mara perked up at the mention of me being queer, but I didn’t have time to dwell or freak out about it. I was too busy coming up with a name for my angel.

“I will obviously do a shittier job than God, but how about Simcha?” A name used for both Jewish boys and girls, and it literally translates to ‘joy’. “It makes me really happy knowing you’re there.”

I waited for a response but when none came I began to regret being so hasty. Did I fuck it up? Choose the wrong name?

“Simcha says to tell you they love it so much it is messing with their ability to telepathically communicate.” Mara was beaming over at the two of us. “Also, they are worried they may have outed you to me before you intended, which is causing them to be afraid to talk to you again, because they also share your social anxiety.”

Ora was rolling her eyes so hard I was afraid they’d fall out, turning her spheres in my direction and raising a wing to point at Mara before lifting two feathers. I was not yet fluent in angel charades, but the message came through loud enough.

And now it was my turn to worry I’d invaded someone’s privacy. Mara must have noticed my blush because she smiled at me. “I’m guessing my angel just informed you that I am a safe space and also very, very gay.”

I nodded.

“I am also single.”

“Oh.”

Tell her you were assigned a single dorm.

“What? No. Get your mind out of the gutter.” I turned to Mara. “I am so sorry if you heard that. Simcha and I need to have a chat about appropriate things to say to humans.”

“Perhaps Ora and I should go over that as well,” Mara said, nonplussed. “But maybe we sort it out after dinner? The food’s actually pretty good, and we already missed the fish and the soup. I’d hate to miss the kugel.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Which is how I ended up escorting a smoking hot girl with type 1 diabetes, an angel that can’t speak, and a sometimes-invisible non-binary angel back to Friday night dinner at the campus Hillel.

I was still kind of freaked out. Except in a good way. Because it was becoming infinitely clear that I was no longer alone.

3769 words

Y.M. Resnik (she/her) is a scientist and writer from the NY area. While she loves creating new worlds and reimagining Jewish folklore, her main goal is simply to brighten your day with a story. Her work has appeared in Cast of Wonders, Worlds of Possibility, and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction of 2022. When not writing, she can be found collecting tiaras and trying not to kill her houseplants.

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

DP FICTION #102A: “On a Smoke-Blackened Wing” by Joanne Rixon

edited by Ziv Wities

The airplane is gray and gleaming, rising off the ground into the fog of early morning like a magic trick, obscured and then revealed, impossible. The engines roar too loudly, like they will tear down the sky. They roar and roar, and then—

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.

***

Avie

I’ve always loved birds. When I was five I asked my dad for a bird feeder so I could see birds out my window when I was sitting at my desk doing remote school, but he just handed me his phone and said, “you know how to look up videos.” I do know, but bird videos aren’t as cool as having my very own bird friends that came up to my window to say hello. And anyway, I already had a tablet when I was five because kindergarten went on remote school after the wildfire that burned down the school building and made us have to drive in the middle of the night to my uncle’s house and sleep on his floor for two whole weeks, so I just used my tablet.

I asked a bunch of times for a bird feeder and my dad said, no, we didn’t have any place to put a bird feeder, and then even when we moved to the good wildfire refugee housing he still said no, the birds didn’t need me to rescue them from the wildfires. But then on my birthday when I turned seven my dad got me a present and it was a bird feeder! It’s a special kind with different colored windows just like our apartment building, so you can put different seeds in it so each bird can eat their favorite food. Blue jays eat peanuts! But other birds, like sparrows, only like small seeds, you can tell because their beaks are so tiny!

My birthday was two days ago and this morning I hung the feeder out on the branch of the magnolia tree with some wire, and my dad helped, and almost right away birds started coming! I saw a blue jay and some tiny ones with black on their heads and a bright yellow one that was a goldfinch! My birthday present from my aunt and uncle was an app for my tablet where I can take a picture of a bird and it tells me its name and all its facts like what color its eggs are. I think they talked to my dad so they knew I was going to have birds! This is definitely my best birthday ever.

***

The next time, we are grackles. Bodies the size of a clenched fist, sleek slick ink-black feathers, pale eyes that gleam like pearls in midnight moonlight. We flock at first in the shape of the plane we used to be, remembering how it felt to be bolts and panels, wires and combustion. Each passenger, now winged, remains in our assigned seats for an instant before our bodies realize the seats, too, are black birds and we are all lifted on the currents of air that have been disturbed by our transformations.

We fly.

***

Avie

My bird app has lots of sections, like one section for different kinds of birds that perch on branches, and a section for owls and hawks, and a section for birds that live on the beach. There’s a lot that don’t live in California where I can ever see them. They live in places where I could never even go, like New York or the Amazon Rainforest or an island in the ocean.

The saddest birds are the ones with a little star beside the place they live in. The star means they used to live there but they don’t live there anymore because they’re completely dead. Maybe humans hunted them and ate them until they were all gone. Or maybe they got all burned up in a wildfire, like my mom in her car, or maybe they flew away to the moon!

That’s a joke, birds don’t live on the moon. I know that because I’m in second grade now and we saw a movie of astronauts and robots on the moon and other places like Mars where there aren’t any birds. During the movie I looked out my window and I saw a pretty bird I never saw before that was soft and gray and gold-pink. It was looking right at me! I tried telling it about the moon but it flew away.

***

The drone that becomes a Mexican sheartail was manufactured in Mexico. The sheartail darts—we flex our wings, our speed like a flash of light off the water.

The American-made drone becomes a red-throated loon. Another becomes an ivory-billed woodpecker. We goshawk, we fish eagle. We pelican.

We shimmer and disperse, we coalesce. We are becoming powerful.

***

Avie

I can’t decide which kind of bird is my favorite. Hummingbirds are really, really pretty. I saw one this morning perching on the tip of the magnolia branch right beside my window! It was small and shiny just like I remember and it had a bright red patch on its throat and it looked right at me with one eye and then the other eye! I think hummingbirds are my favorite.

My bird app says these kind of hummingbirds are star-birds: “Allen’s hummingbirds are extinct in the wild.” I’m getting really good at reading because my tablet came with an app that tells you what words mean and how to say them out loud. I wanted to ask my dad why my bird app says my hummingbirds are extinct, which means all completely dead, when there was one in the magnolia tree, but he had his work headphones on and his boss gets annoyed if he misses answering a customer. So I didn’t have anyone to ask. Maybe my tablet is wrong and the bird in the tree was a different kind of hummingbird. The picture I took was sort of blurry.

***

For many days the planes and drones cower on the ground. We circle the globe on the high currents, gaining flock members in ones and twos, from wind-blown balloons and children’s toys. In our bones we remember the sky full of our wingbeats, our shadows darkening the ground like a storm system from mountain to mountain.

Nectar-eaters and animal-eaters dispute approaches—there we argue, here we converse, there we shriek. Our flock contains contradictions, but we parliament, and eventually we settle under the leaves and soften our voices. Soon, the airplanes take wing and we wait, using the night-hunters’ stillnesses, until the sky is filled with thousands of machines. Now we rise.

***

Avie

The funniest thing ever happened today! I was heating up my breakfast roll in the microwave and outside the window I saw so many birds and they were all walking on the ground. They were all sizes, with long ostrich legs and short duck legs and black and brown and orange and blue… some of them were big fat gray birds with funny faces. Those ones I didn’t even need my bird app to find their names because I already knew they were dodos!

I wanted to tell my dad that there were dodos in the courtyard, but he had his headphones on and was talking in his weird customer voice, so I just waved at his boss through the webcam and I went and got my tablet so I could look up the facts for the birds who were visiting me.

Some of them I couldn’t get good pictures of because there were so many of them. It was birds all over, on the steps up to the apartments across from us, and on top of Ms. Holloway’s car that she has a permit for because Nika uses a wheelchair, and a whole crowd on the grass in the middle and everywhere!

The ones whose names I could find were all star-birds. Every single one! Except they kept moving around a lot so maybe I missed a lot of them that weren’t. Most of them were in the section of the app on birds that can’t fly at all, which I didn’t know there were so many! And then my dad realized I was late for video school and he made me close my bird app and log on.

***

Now we are many. Now we are no longer lonely. Do the ground-dwellers know what we are becoming? They send fighter jets after us that scream through the sky like they are about to die and are so, so frightened of the end of the world.

Instead of an end, we offer them a beginning. The jets become swans, and the pilots also become swans. The bullets from their powerful guns take flight and become cliff swallows and storm petrels and Carolina parakeets.

We whistle and screech and sing a laughing racket like every sound at once. We are all one flock, tumbling through the sky like nothing at all can hurt us.

***

Avie

In school the kids in my class were talking about how the airplanes disappeared and no one knows why or how or if they’ll ever come back. Austen was crying and Deshawn told her she wasn’t allowed to cry because it was his cousins who disappeared off a plane, not hers, and then T’resa said she thought it would be fun to be a bird, and then Austen screamed at her to shut up and that it wasn’t true that anyone turned into a bird because that was impossible. Then our teacher muted us all and said he was turning school off for the day.

My dad was still working and I’m not supposed to interrupt him even if I’m lonely because he has to work hard so some day we can move out of refugee housing and I can have a bedroom. I wanted to ask him whether people could turn into birds and it made me mad that I couldn’t! I know Austen was really mad about it and so was Deshawn even if he didn’t scream at anyone, and I didn’t say so because Austen was crying, but I’m like T’resa. Birds have more friends than just video school friends that get turned off when your teacher is mad that someone yelled! Birds have flocks which means they have friends all the time.

I went outside and waved to all the pretty birds perched on the roof of our apartment building—they had such pretty tails, like black and white arrows and swooping green ribbons. I’m sure they were star-birds, even if I didn’t know their names because I didn’t have my tablet with me. They didn’t wave back but they bobbed their heads and whistled hello, and that made me feel a little better.

I practiced jumping down the stairs for a little while, to see what might happen. I was going to try to climb up the railing and jump off there, to see if that would be high enough to turn into a bird, but Nika’s mom stuck her head out the window and said I couldn’t.

***

By the time the ground-dwellers and their metals stop flying altogether we are hundreds of hundreds of millions. We are an ocean of wings beneath the bright sun. We encircle the world like the water-ocean and our wings outmatch the cold, wet waves.

With the sky closed to them, the ground-dwellers live slower. So many are angry about reaching the limits of their power, but each bullet they fire only increases our numbers.

Those who are not angry are quieter. Some of them come to us, and we beauty them, gently. We invite them to sing.

***

Avie

This morning the pretty gray and gold-pink birds outside my window didn’t fly away even when I put my hand on the glass. I like them. They’re nice.

I told my dad I was going outside to play and he said I could go by myself if I promised to stay in the courtyard because he was busy working and Nika and her mom were outside. Even though Nika’s a lot older than me she still plays with me sometimes, but her mom said not today because they were going to the doctor to check on Nika’s lungs, which got smoke inhalation during the fire that got their house.

Even though I promised my dad I would stay in the courtyard, I went around the corner and down the street and up the hill and climbed up the big rock at the top of the hill where I like to sit sometimes because you can see the tops of the roofs of the buildings where all us wildfire refugees live. I thought about practicing jumping off the rock, but I didn’t.

I felt kind of sad and mad and it was cloudy like a sore throat. Like there was a wildfire burning far away but still close enough to smell the ash from all the dead trees and dead squirrels and dead deer and dead moms that got all burned up in their cars. But then I heard birds singing, the soft sound of the gray-gold-pink birds my app says are passenger pigeons even though that’s impossible because they’re extinct. I looked around and saw birds landing in the bushes, in the trees all around me, in the grass. A pigeon landed on the rock beside my foot and cocked her head at me. Her eyes were black with a pink ring on the edges like she’d been crying, and it made me feel better to know someone else felt the way I do.

There were other kinds of birds in the flock, some small brown seagulls and herons with long legs like the chopsticks in takeout teriyaki, and robins and blue jays and orioles, who aren’t star-birds, and a whole cluster of bright beautiful extinct hummingbirds that swooped and darted and then hovered all in the air above me.

At a signal I couldn’t hear, the flock launched themselves back into the sky. Their wings blew the hair back from my face and I knew they wanted me to fly up into the sky with them. I couldn’t hear the signal to go, but in a way, I could hear it. I could feel it in my body lifting me up. But I didn’t know how to do it.

The pigeon and the hummingbirds were still there and they looked at me and I looked at them and then down at my hands and my arms which were turning iridescent green-black like a hummingbird and then I thought, maybe my mom could be like a star-bird, like a hummingbird, completely dead but then not dead at all, and when I jumped off the rock I spread my wings.

2548 words

Joanne Rixon lives in the shadow of an active volcano with a rescue chihuahua named after a dinosaur. They are a member of STEW and the Dreamcrashers, and are an organizer with the North Seattle Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup. Their poetry has appeared in GlitterShip, their book reviews in the Seattle Times and the Cascadia Subduction Zone Literary Quarterly, and their short speculative fiction in venues including Terraform, Fireside, and Lady’s Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Joanne Rixon’s fiction has previous appeared in Diabolical Plots, with “The Cliff of Hands”. If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #98B: “Bottled Words” by Carol Scheina

edited by David Steffen

When Dad sent me into the kitchen for a container—any lidded vessel at all—to bottle Grandma’s voice, all I could find were lonely lids.

That wasn’t unexpected. When Dad cooked, he turned the bottom of pans into crusts of blackened rice, resistant to any amount of scrubbing, eventually slipping them into the darkness of a closed trash bag. He somehow managed to explode our ovenproof casserole dishes when baking. Thus our pots and dishes had vanished, though he’d kept the lids, vowing to find a match at the thrift store. He never did.

I spread lids over the white kitchen tile like a buffet of metal and ceramic, these orphans of failed dinners. Wondering what would work best to capture a sound.

Not knowing what would work best for, in truth, I’d never actually heard a bottled voice. I didn’t want to risk it. Not with hearing aids.

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.

Dad wanted to bottle Grandma’s voice while she stayed with us, these three summery-melty days before her room at the memory care facility opened. Three days of feeling sunshine through windows and trying to catch a glimpse of warmth in Grandma’s eyes. It had been so long since I’d seen that warmth.

Three days to bottle words I’d never risk listening to.

I couldn’t tell Dad that, though. People can keep words bottled up too.

When I finally dashed upstairs, I carried a cereal bowl with a yellowish Corningware casserole glass top sliding around like an oversized hat. But I was too late. Grandma’s words had vanished into silence.

Silence never really bothered me much, since all it took was a little click-off of my aids and I’d be in silence again.

Except with Grandma, the silence from her was also in the way she sat, the way she looked and didn’t see you.

Dad’s sigh was too soft for my hearing aids, but I could see it, the way his shoulders sagged like one of those droopy thrift store sweaters you see slipping off the hanger. “I wasn’t expecting Grandma to be lucid, but she came back to me for a bit.” He looked at the cereal bowl and casserole lid. “I’ll see if I can find some secondhand pots at the thrift store tonight. We’ll be ready next time.”

I watched Dad’s mouth as I listened. I’d been watching that mouth since birth, connecting the sounds I picked up along with mouth movements in some strange dance that formed words in my mind. Even if I didn’t always get every sound, I could always nod like I understood everything.

I nodded.

Grandma shifted in her chair, the one that had given Dad that wide, excited grin when he’d brought it home from a yard sale. It was exactly like the chair Grandma used to have in her house, but this one was too stiff. Grandma’s chair had rings from the stains that had been washed out, a few threads pulled here and there, but it had always smelled like clean lemons and molded around your butt like a soft hug.

Grandma used to be hugs and smiles, and now we were all shifting around uncomfortably like we were in stiff chairs of our own.

Grandma didn’t look up when I popped a kiss on her cheek and stepped out of the room.

Dad tapped my shoulder to draw my eyes. “We’ve got time. I want to make sure her voice is there with all our family voices. We’ve got a lot of bottles. A lot of family history waiting for you.”

I nodded.

“Your mom’s waiting too.”

I don’t exactly hear when a voice cracks, but I can see it. The cracks were there in Dad’s eyes, blinking a faster-than-usual rhythm. They were there in his clenched jaw. The little ways a body can crack and show the sorrow under the surface.

I couldn’t do a simple nod-response to those cracks, so I muttered, “Soon.” I’d been muttering that since I hit twelve and Dad thought I was finally old enough to be able to remember the voices. To remember Mom’s voice.

More cracks in Dad’s face.

I slipped into my room with an echo of “soon” around me. I didn’t want to hear that. That was a lie. I turned the aids off, the abrupt silence ringing in my ears until that faded.

I sat on my bed and felt like a lid in our kitchen. Unable to hold any sound.

***

I lived in a house with a never-ending game of Telephone keeping the family stories alive.

Nearly every free wall had vintage bookshelves that Dad purchased from online yard sales, estate sales, antique shops. They all veered toward shades of dark brown, shiny with oils and age, with scents of dust and cigar smoke and bitter wood settled in like a house guest you’d never be able to evict.

Those bookshelves held our ancestor’s bottled voices. The oldest containers were rusty tin cans, the lids held on with yellowed string that Dad had reinforced with duct tape. A family member whose name has long blurred to forgetfulness in my mind (Dad remembered them all) had been organized and put voices in clear mason jars topped with round lids and a square of plaid fabric. I liked to trace the swirly glass patterns with my eyes and imagine what a voice looked like.

Oh, people wrote stories down, of course, but as Dad always reminded me, with that eye-sparkle he got, “It’s powerful when you hear a bottled voice. You get the feel of their breath in your ear. The smell of oranges or spaghetti sauce or whatever they’d last eaten. Bottling a voice is more than just words on paper, or a video or tape recording. You can hear more, feel more. You get to sit down with someone in the past.”

Seems like a lot of stuff wasn’t the same unless it came straight from the voice, but I wouldn’t know about that.

The family rule was when you heard a voice, you remembered the story and told it again in a new container. One day, I was supposed to bottle my own voice—probably into a pot with a mismatched lid.

Our family stories would literally speak-and breathe—for generations to come.

Except Grandma had stories she still hadn’t bottled. Dad had found Grandma’s records and knew there were stories that were missing. Stories he wanted to save, stories for me.

***

On Grandma’s second day at our house, the sky grumped gray clouds at us, matching Dad’s mood. Grandma stayed silent.

Come evening, the three of us sat at the dinner table—one of those vintage white Formica tables with aluminum legs. All our chairs were different shades and shapes of wood, as Dad hadn’t found matching chairs just yet at his weekly thrift store visits.

While Grandma ate, she kept her eyes aimed at her plate, fork moving up and down with the regularity of a machine.

Dad pulled up old videos to watch on the computer. He watched videos most every night—old family tapes converted to digital, YouTube videos on ancient wars, past methods of food preparation—you name it.

A lot of stuff wasn’t professionally captioned, and the auto-captioning was just cringe-worthy. I used to get angry over the lack of words on the screen, but … no, to be honest, I still get angry. A whole online world that shut me out simply because I couldn’t hear well enough. But I didn’t like feeling angry all the time, or making Dad feel guilty about enjoying his videos. It wasn’t his fault the captions sucked. So as Dad watched his videos, I turned my hearing aids off and opened a book.

Slipping into a book was like slipping into Grandma’s old, familiar chair. It hugged my brain.

Until Dad tapped the table to get my attention.

I looked up. His mouth moved. I nodded, but he knew I wasn’t listening, his fingers pointing at my ears. Sometimes, I couldn’t bluff at hearing. I turned both aids on.

Dad waited for my thumbs up confirmation. Sound had been activated.

“I burned another pot.”

“Oh, Dad.”

He grinned. “Saved the lid! I’ll try to find a new pot next time I go shopping. But hey, scoot your chair closer to Grandma. I’ve got a video I want us to watch together.”

“Is it captioned?” I stepped into that question carefully.

“I’ve got this new captioning plug-in that should work. Besides, it’s good practice for you to hear her voice. You’ve been doing great with the hearing aids.” Dad fiddled with the computer. “I remember when you were born, doctors thought you wouldn’t be able to hear at all, and now look at you.” Pride in his voice.

What could I say to that? I nodded.

The video on the computer screen showed Grandma with fewer lines in her face, more blinks in her eyes. There were no stumbles in her voice. I could hear the rhythm, the surety as she spoke. Yet Grandma’s voice was a pattern of rising and lowering pitches that my brain couldn’t fit into words. Puzzle pieces that couldn’t be pounded into place.

I shifted over to the captioning to help: “Prince esterable knowing five anna into the sea.”

How I despised auto-captioning.

Dad rarely noticed the words onscreen. I don’t think he’d notice if a tornado screamed next to our kitchen, to be honest, so lost he became when it came to history. I didn’t want to break the mood and bug him once more about the indecipherable words on the screen.

Instead, I watched Grandma’s face as she watched her younger self on the screen—the way she leaned forward on that stiff chair, lips moving as though reciting the story along with herself. She’d grown softer in just a few moments of video.

Dad had an aluminum pot ready when the video ended.

“Do you remember that story? Can you tell it to me?”

But Grandma had gone stiff again.

Dad slumped back into his chair. “I want to at least get one of Grandma’s voice to put up there. So many voices up there for you to hear. See that ugly tin up there? That one’s from the 1890s. Not sure why no one’s opened that yet. I’ve always wanted to be the first, but figured I’d wait for my kid so there’d be another generation to hear it.”

I gave a quick smile and nod.

Dad didn’t let up, though. “At some point, I bet you’ll be ready to hear your mom.”

“At some point. Soon.” I pushed my chair back from the table.

Dad looked at the shelves. I didn’t want to look at him.

Grandma looked at her food. Her eyes didn’t move as I kissed her cheek.

In my room, my eyes slipped back into my book. People talked on pages, but you didn’t have to hear them. I never had to worry if a hearing aid battery died mid-sentence, or if I didn’t hear the sentence properly. I never had to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”

I never had to smile and nod and pretend.

***

On Grandma’s last full day with us, Dad’s mouth had gotten all tight and pinched at the ends.

Dad was convinced that even though we’d still visit her at the memory care center, it wouldn’t be the same. If she was ever going to open up again, it would be here, surrounded by family.

He settled into a chair beside her, videos of Young Grandma speaking. Several times, he started the opening of a story and waited for her to continue.

I could feel the pressure building like one of Dad’s casseroles in the oven, his voice bearing down on Grandma’s thin shoulders.

No wonder she never spoke. Stories should be comfortable places to slip into.

Dad called me in close to dinnertime. “I need a break. Can you watch her while I make dinner? Call me if she starts to talk?”

I nodded.

Grandma’s eyes focused on a book, thin and tall, the cover’s bright colors rubbed to pastels. It looked like one of Dad’s thrift store finds.

Book in hand, I sat into the seat opposite Grandma, and we settled into our worlds.

Silence nestled around us like a warm blanket. She looked comfortable in her chair, for once.

***

Dad tapped the table that evening before I could start eating. “Are you plugged in?!” Not shouting, but his lips over-enunciated every syllable.

“My aids are on. Sound’s activated.”

“I noticed you two were reading earlier. She say anything about that?”

“No. Maybe she just doesn’t want to talk. Maybe she just wants to read her book.”

Grandma’s fork moved up and down.

Dad’s eyes sparkled. “Our family stories aren’t like anything you’ll ever find in a book. I got to hear an account of our ancestors during the 1700s, told by my grandmother, who’d heard it from hers. I listened after my grandmother had died, and hearing her voice again, feeling the breath against my cheek, the smell of her rose perfume… It was powerful.”

I nodded.

His eyes shifted to the shelves of Our Family History. “Time goes by so quickly. Things change, a jar accidentally breaks, and the opportunity is lost. Look at your grandmother. Her stories are gone, and I wonder if we’re ever going to get them back.”

I mumbled, “It’s okay.”

“What?”

Voice a bit louder. “It should be okay if Grandma doesn’t talk. We don’t have to bottle everything.”

Silence, and this one stretched an oily film of discomfort over the table. “Those bottles are our connection with the past. People we’ve lost. Your mother’s voice is up there waiting for you.”

“I know. I’ll listen soon.”

“When is that going to be?” Cracks in his face.

“When I’m ready.”

“Why don’t we listen to something tonight. If you practice more at listening, you’ll get better.”

My knuckles turned white gripping the fork. “Practice is not going to magically restore my hearing.”

“Your hearing aids…”

But I’d tipped a ball down a mountainside, and I couldn’t stop it from rolling. “I can’t even understand videos without captioning. I don’t catch every word that’s said. I don’t hear like you!”

Grandma looked up, fork frozen.

Dad’s eyes shifted to the bottled voices, then back to me. I wonder if he was thinking the same thing I was: I would never be a part of the family history.

Who could swallow dinner after swallowing that truth? My chair scraped back as I scrambled from the vintage table, past the vintage shelves. Past a history that would never be mine.

Into my room. Onto my bed, the bedspread soft and welcoming, a book with words I could dive into and always follow.

I read. I understood every word.

Like Dad didn’t understand me. Like I’d never understand Mom.

I couldn’t read any more; not with a face full of wet.

***

When my face dried off, I realized Dad had slipped in and out without me hearing him. The only way I knew that was because of the note on my bed. My eyes still felt blurry, and I had rub them a bit to make out his sloppy word shapes.

Your mom liked to make up silly songs. Like Grandma. These are the words your mom bottled for you:

Little baby, sweet as ice cream

You are why I’m craving ice cream

Gonna send your dad to pick some up for me

Chocolate chip or cookies and cream

Having you is such a dream

Little baby, you’ll be my sweetest ice cream

All these years, he’d asked if I was ready to hear Mom’s voice. Had he unbottled Mom’s container now?

Why did that hit me so hard?

I didn’t want to open it anyway.

I wouldn’t hear it properly.

But I’d never have the opportunity now.

That hit like every one of our vintage bookshelves were pressing down on my chest.

I threw off the soft bedcovers.

Dad sat at the Formica table alone, forehead resting on a green jar with a neat gold lid. He heard me coming in. Of course he did.

He spoke first: “I never told you which container held your mother’s voice. I just realized you’ve never asked.”

“Did you open it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I listened to every single other voice she bottled. I went through them all in a few weeks. But this is your jar. She made it just for you. I was there. Three days after she bottled this, she went into early labor and …”

I knew this story. Dad didn’t have to tell me any more. I’d been born too early, with ears that didn’t work right. The birth hadn’t gone right, and her story ended shortly after mine began.

Dad’s voice sounded full of lumps. It took all my lipreading to make the rest of his words out: “I’ve been trying to remember her voice all this time. The past, it just … slips away, no matter how hard I try. It’s so hard to find things to bring it back.”

Silence can be knowing there’s a river between two people and wondering how to build a bridge across it.

Into that quiet, Grandma walked in, the thin rubbed-cover book in her hand. She placed it on the white tabletop and looked at me with a hug behind her eyes. Let’s read together.

So much can be said without words. Grandma was proof.

And sometimes, you need those silences to form words that can’t be kept inside.

I let the silence linger before taking a deep breath. “Dad, even with aids, I still don’t pick up everything you do. That’s why I like reading. Captions, books, anything. It’s my way of understanding things. Not through sound. That’s why I’ve never asked which bottle was Mom’s. I’d never hear it right.”

Dad’s turn to step into the silence. “I always liked to think you couldn’t bluff me. That I’d know if you weren’t listening or just pretending to understand. You bluffed better than I knew.”

He gave a lopsided grin before growing serious again. “When I found out you couldn’t hear, someone recommended I use sign language with you. Maybe it’s time to look into that.”

Sign language. What would stories be like through that? I knew about sign, but my world had always been voices, lipreading, hearing aids. What if I could be a new pot, ready to be filled with new words and stories and … signs?

A future tickled at my thoughts, but first—

“Can we open Mom’s jar?”

Dad’s lips tightened. “I don’t want to pressure you. You don’t have to listen.”

“I’m going to read. You’re going to listen.”

Did people feel all fluttery when they uncorked genies in bottles?

When the gold lid came off, Dad, Grandma and I sat around the kitchen table. I squeezed Grandma’s hand. She squeezed back as sound vibrated through the air. Dad listened with soft lips, eyes closed, holding my other hand.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t hear every word. Family surrounded me.

I read my father’s words, eyes tracing every letter of Mom’s song.

I felt my mother’s breath.

Vanilla ice cream. She smelled of ice cream.

3324 words

Author’s Note: The overwhelming majority of deaf children (around 90 percent in the United States) are born to hearing parents. A large number of those parents do not learn to sign to their children. I fall into that statistic, as I grew up a deaf child in a non-signing family. Many families – mine included – have traditions and songs from generations past. Those traditions are a beautiful thing. But for me, with a 90-100 decibel hearing loss in both ears, I struggled with words to religious ceremonies and lyrics to songs. I struggled to explain that hearing aids didn’t fully restore my hearing. Those experiences formed the basis of this story.

Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative fiction author who hails from the
Northern Virginia region. Her stories have appeared in publications
such as Escape Pod, Cossmass Infinities, Daily Science Fiction, and
more. You can follow her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com.

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