mythology – Diabolical Plots

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

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crowd gasped, but the matador could not.

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

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

This end didn’t feel so bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hole occupied the spot where his heart should be.

A tearing wound, no longer bleeding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The red curtain pulled away and vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I would like that very much.”

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

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

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

2699 words

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

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

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DP FICTION #96A: “The Monologue of a Moon Goddess in the Palace of Pervasive Cold” by Anja Hendrikse Liu

edited by Ziv Wities

I used to think that the Mid-Autumn Festival was simply a pain in the ass. Embodying the popular conception of idealized heterosexual womanhood—even for one night—is an arduous challenge.

That’s still true, of course. But lately it’s been overshadowed by a larger problem: The offerings are dwindling. Two centuries ago, I would’ve built thrones made of mooncakes in every room of my silent palace, would’ve filled hot tubs with the fruit sent up on festival night. Nowadays, storing and preserving and pickling feels like a losing race, like if I let even one persimmon spoil in the cold moon air, there won’t be enough to sustain me and Jade Rabbit for the year.

That worry sits at the top of my mind as I consider my checklist for the festival.

Beauty. Gentleness. Elegance. Quietness. Kindness. Self-sacrifice. Intelligence is in there somewhere, though I’m always exhausted by the time I reach it.

And the intangible qualities are just the start of it. Being the real moon goddess requires a great deal of clothing and makeup. The real moon goddess must be elaborate, delicate, draped in folds of silk. The real moon goddess must be radiant. In other words, the real moon goddess must be utterly unlike the real moon, which is content in its quiet, rocky existence—cold and gray, gray and cold, just gray dirt and darker gray shadows in the shallow craters, all the way to the horizon where the gray edge meets the black sky.

The single parallel that redeems the comparison? Both the moon and I glow. From afar.

That’s all.

And so it’s the version of me in a full face and silk hanfu—bright, ethereal—that people believe is the real moon goddess. They probably also believe that I eat a few mooncakes one night a year, then subsist on mysterious moon mists the rest of the time.

Jade Rabbit helps with my hair and face, bless him, mumbling about skin serums and retinoids as he applies my eyelashes. “Not that you’re aging, obviously,” he says.

Obviously. I’m a goddess.

But I am fading. Every year, it takes a thicker layer of makeup to paint on my celestial visage. I would’ve given it all up a long time ago, except that I’m under eternal contractual obligation.

The most ridiculous part? By the time Jade Rabbit finishes my makeup, I’m wishing there were one more layer of blush to apply, one more eyebrow hair to pluck. But the makeup has already taken longer than it should. I can’t put off the last step. At my nod, Jade Rabbit unwraps the veil of elegance, quietness, self-sacrifice, and all the rest.

At this point every year, I tell him, “You should be the moon goddess instead of me.” He’s a true embodiment of all those traits, plus he has naturally thick eyelashes.

At this point every year, he just lifts up the veil and settles it over my head. His arms are the size of little shrimps, but he carries it as if it’s a sheet of silk, not a crushing shroud.

My neck cramps immediately under the weight. It feels heavier every year, no matter how much cross-training I do. Jade Rabbit pokes his paw into my cheek, turning my face to the mirror. The reflection is my own and not my own: eyes drawn large and dark, lips tinted into rosebud perfection, round cheeks washed out to sepulchral white.

“You look so sad,” Jade Rabbit says. “What’s wrong? Not just your usual festival grumpiness?”

I hold the veil of elegance, quietness, self-sacrifice, and all the rest away from my face. It takes all my strength. “Every year, it’s getting worse. Soon we won’t even have enough to live on.”

Jade Rabbit nods, tapping away on his iPad. When he holds it out, I see a graph that looks like a playground slide. “If the trend holds, that’ll be in twenty-three years.”

“How are you so cheerful about it?” My arms shake so badly that I have to let go of the veil. It drops over me with a whump. My voice echoes inside it as I add, “Is it because you think I’ll starve myself so you can have enough to eat? You’re cute, but you’re not that cute.”

It’s a lie. I would absolutely starve myself if it meant Jade Rabbit could live, and he knows it.

He’s nice enough not to rub it in. The iPad goes away, and he reaches through the veil as if it’s only fog, tucking a strand of my hair into place. “I’m not cheerful,” he says. “What happens, happens. At least we’ll have each other.”

“Is it a problem with me?” I don’t really mean to say the words, but the veil of elegance, quietness, self-sacrifice, and all the rest has a way of making me say things I don’t really think, and believe things I know aren’t true. “Would they give more offerings if I were more elegant? Quiet? Self-sacrificing?”

Jade Rabbit only shakes his head.

I know the moment of moonrise because the LED light fixtures power up, brighter, whiter, more ethereal than the moon’s natural light. I step out onto the balcony of the Palace. Like me, it’s been made up for the festival, with silk screens to hide the LEDs, the atmospheric wind machines, and the freezers where we store the offerings.

For an instant, looking out at the mid-autumn evening, I forget the weight of the veil and the empty freezers behind the screens. I tilt my head ever so slowly (it’s the only way I can move without snapping my neck), and look down on the earth. In my arms, Jade Rabbit whispers something warm and gentle. This is how festival nights used to feel.

A forest of red candles glows in the dark, the lights diffuse and haloed, like reflections in a still lake. Laughter carries up to the moon, twined together with the scent of incense, and countless faces gaze upward, families seated together in yards and on roofs. Every face opens in wonder as I step onto the balcony. If I had any doubt that the old contract stands firm, that moment of wonder dispels it. To the people below, both the moon and its goddess appear close enough to touch.

Among the glowing faces, a child holds tight to a mooncake with one hand and a parent’s arm with the other. That wide-eyed girl, along with all the other people looking up tonight, will dream of me: a vision with a kind, distant, lovely face, my hair and my silks billowing gently in the breeze of a hidden fan.

As my eyes adjust to the lights, though, the candles resolve into discrete points, and I see that the forest has thinned again since last year. Between the upturned faces are the napes of endless necks and the backs of countless bowed heads. The offering tables are even fewer, sparsely provisioned with persimmons and grapefruits and carved watermelons among the mooncakes. The child doesn’t offer up her cake, instead holding it tighter. Once, the parents would’ve scolded her; now, they don’t notice.

I want to curse, but the veil keeps my face fixed in a peaceful smile. If only I could go back to the days when the Mid-Autumn Festival was just a pain in the ass.

The offerings come to me, as I’m entitled by my contract, and Jade Rabbit logs them all on his iPad as they arrive. I stand on display for hours, until the red candles wink out and our grand LED moonlight dims. Down below, the families return indoors to enjoy each other’s company or to fall into bed.

The time is a blur, but finally, I’m back inside. Jade Rabbit lifts the veil of elegance, quietness, self-sacrifice, and all the rest. Air rushes into my lungs and I collapse onto a couch. “Thank Heaven. I thought my face was going to get stuck that way.”

“You say that every year. Get up so I can rescue your hanfu.”

I oblige him, grabbing a pear from among the offerings. I’m vindictively happy to see my lipstick smear a pink mark when I bite into it. I wipe off the rest of the makeup, and Jade Rabbit lets down my hair. Only when I’m back in my sweats do I feel strong enough to ask, “So? How bad is it?”

“I’m doing the math.” He doesn’t provide details.

I lie on the couch and watch him for a few minutes as he plans how to store and preserve the offerings. I can feel my body relaxing back into its comfortable shape, my shoulders a little slumped and my lips tilted down instead of up. Jade Rabbit is chomping on his ear as he enters numbers into his spreadsheet, so I give him a mooncake to chew on instead, and then take one for myself, one of the trendy ones stuffed with ice cream. I pick up a bottle of wine to go with it, and head out to the balcony.

Things look different without the festival spotlights. Only a pale film of light remains, illuminating the walls and grounds of my Palace of Pervasive Cold. Despite our efforts to keep it clean, it looks old and gray and a little grubby, like the moonsoil. Earth seems much more distant.

I dangle my legs over the balcony edge and open the wine. Far below me, a child slips out through a window and sits the same way: legs dangling over the side of a tiny metal balcony. In her hand, she holds a slightly crushed mooncake.

I recognize her. She’s the same child who clung to her parent’s arm during the festival.

As if sensing my attention, her head snaps up. For a few moments, she wears the same expression of awe from earlier in the evening. Then her mouth softens and her eyebrows tip upward, and I realize I was wrong. Her previous expression was not awe, but anxiety. Only in its absence do I recognize it.

I’m so busy trying to figure out what this new expression means that I forget where I am, what I look like—and the fact that no one should be able to see me now that the festival is over. But the girl clearly sees something. One of her hands uncurls into a minuscule wave.

My stomach drops. If I stay still—

“Hello?” the girl says.

I curse.

“You’re the moon goddess,” she breathes.

“How are you talking to me?” I shove my bottle of wine behind me. I haven’t spoken to a human in… centuries. They don’t talk anymore. They just stare.

The girl tips her head to the side. “You are the moon goddess, aren’t you? I’ve been wondering where you were, but Ma and Ba won’t tell me. They kept saying the goddess was that lady who came out before. Who was she, anyway?”

I’m out of practice with making conversation. I can’t think of a single thing to say.

She continues, with the seriousness unique to childhood, “It’s all right if you don’t want to talk. I know you’re the real goddess. The other lady was like, if someone imagined what a goddess would look like without ever meeting one.”

That other lady was me, I try to say. Maybe if I were wearing the veil, the words would’ve come out, but I’m not, and so they stay unspoken.

The girl rests her chin on the bars of the balcony. If she’d been wearing the veil, the weight of it might’ve snapped her head right off at that angle, but she isn’t. She sighs, not a sad sigh.

We stare at each other for what feels like a long time, each on our own balcony, legs dangling, mirroring gazes and postures. The only light left is the moon glow, behind me, and I’m sure I must look like little more than a shadow in sweats, not like a goddess at all. So my heart flips strangely when the girl holds out her hand. In it is the slightly crushed mooncake, with a bite visible on one side.

“I can give this to you because you’re really Chang’e,” she confides. “Don’t let that other lady take it. She’s already stolen all your offerings.” She hesitates, then breaks off the bitten part of the cake and places the other piece on the railing. “I’ll leave it here for you, okay?”

I don’t say anything. The girl’s eyes lose focus. I don’t think she can see me anymore. I don’t know why we even got these few stolen moments of closeness.

I sit on the balcony. The LEDs have switched off, to lie dormant for another year. The natural moonlight makes me feel more like myself: I don’t have to worry about the way the LEDs glare at every dip of my body and every empty corner of the Palace.

It makes me feel like I used to, when the Mid-Autumn Festival was…

When it was more than a pain in the ass. When it wasn’t a pain. Because, once, very long ago, it wasn’t.

Then, I would look down to the earth, and girls would look back, and speak to me, and understand that the face of the moon goddess was my face, not an imposter’s. Then, I didn’t think about the offerings.

In the centuries since, I’ve forgotten how not to think about the offerings, just as I’ve forgotten what the festival feels like without the pain.

When I head inside, Jade Rabbit looks up from his iPad. “Just in time. We should pack away the mooncakes, and then we’ll need to spend the afternoon pickling. With a little planning—which I’ve already done—we’ll be all right for this year.”

I manage a smile and pick him up in my arms. Half of a slightly squashed mooncake perches at the top of the pile of offerings.

Impulsively, unsure if I’m even speaking aloud, I say, “What would happen if I didn’t do the whole makeup-and-veil thing next year? What if I just went out there in my sweats?”

“You’d be in breach of contract,” Jade Rabbit says, not particularly disapproving.

“What else?”

He wriggles in my arms until he can reach his iPad. A moment later, he flips the screen around to reveal an updated graph: the same downward slope of offerings that he showed me before, and then a new line that drops in a much steeper cliff next year.

I expect my heart to drop with it. Instead, I find myself thinking about the way the girl looked at me as she perched her treasured mooncake on the balcony railing. I think of the veil, stored away in a cedar chest to keep off the moon moths. I think of how the air brushed my real face, my fading face, as I looked down at the earth and spoke to a human for the first time in centuries.

I’ve barely touched the mooncakes this year, but I feel full, and warm, with Jade Rabbit nestled in my arms.

“You know,” I say, “I think you’re right. I think we’ll be okay.”

2533 words

Author’s Note: Growing up, I often came across the story of the moon goddess Chang’e: told by my Chinese teachers, in textbooks and storybooks, in translation and in Chinese. In some versions, she is purely greedy; in some, purely loyal; sometimes a cautionary tale, sometimes a noble martyr, often an object of desire, and on and on… but she’s never quite a fully fleshed-out person. So this story came about as I wondered who Chang’e might be in her private life, and how a mortal-turned-deity might react to the slow realization that even goddesses are not forever. Also, Jade Rabbit (who’s one of my favorite parts of the story) gets short shrift in many versions of the myth — but given that he is Chang’e’s only companion on the moon, I thought their relationship deserved much more than a footnote.

Anja Hendrikse Liu (she/they) is a creator and devourer of fantasy and sci-fi who wishes she had time and words for all of her dreams. Her short fiction has been published by Fusion Fragment, Air and Nothingness Press, and others. Anja works at an educational technology nonprofit, and in her free time, she loves exploring the world — literally, and also from her home in California via baked goods and mythology.

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DP FICTION #94A: “Midwifery of Gods: A Primer for Mortals” by Amanda Helms

Introduction

Long have midwives passed on their knowledge of birthing: proper positioning, how to turn a babe, breathing techniques, and so on. Some guides, such as Kailiona’s Extraordinary Births, cover the delivery of a demigod from a human and a human babe from an animal. Little, however, has been recorded of the most uncommon births, those of gods. No extant handbook includes the terrifying circumstances wherein mortals are called upon to help deliver gods’ progeny.

This primer aims to fill that void.

Nb: In writing this primer, we, the authors, must make some assumptions. (1) You, the midwife, are mortal. Immortal midwives, like any other deity, tend to believe they need no help, particularly not a mortal-written primer. (2) The god will deliver their progeny vaginally, or, if permitted, via cutting (while this method often results in the death of a human birther, happily, or unhappily depending upon your view, a god, being immortal, will not die), rather than via forehead, forming it from ocean foam, birthing it in hellfire, etc. Such modes of parturition are out of this primer’s scope. (3) You are trained in the basics of midwifery. If not, the god will kill you for your incompetence. That, sadly, we cannot help.

On Priorities

In delivering mortals we would say that your first priority should be the babe; your second, the parent. However, when it comes to deities, we say your first priority should be you. In most god-births, you, the mere mortal midwife, would never be summoned at all. If you are, it is because the delivery is stressed, and the god is desperate. Therefore, we arrange this primer according to priorities: yourself, the babe, the god.

Priority One: Yourself

Gods are capricious. Even though the delivery is already going wrong, you will be blamed. Therefore, protect yourself. If you reach a point where you feel all is lost, be ready to flee. Example distractions: you, and only you, can prepare the oil of poppy that will ease the birth, or you have towels soaking in water drawn from Lethe that you must fetch. However, we cannot assume the god will be unfamiliar with this humble primer; you are best off developing an excuse that is unique to you.

To the extent that you are able, try to ensure you attend the god during daylight. The benefit to you is clear: the Sun’s light allows your mortal eyes to see any barriers in your path should you need to escape. Next preferred is night. Though you will require lamps, it is still superior to dawn and dusk. Such liminal times lend themselves to any curses the god utters against you and are best avoided.

If the god is deity of the Sun, the Moon, etc., use your best judgment as to the birth’s timing. Having the god out of their element, as it were, and presumably less powerful could be beneficial, but the perceived weakness will anger some gods and make them more likely to murder you.

Related: Gods prefer to labor in locales affiliated with their own natures, and in general you will find it difficult to persuade them to leave. Be prepared for oceans, lakes, and rivers; mountainous, flat, or valley regions; deserts; volcanoes; caves; and so on. You would do well to keep a sack of essentials on you at all times in case you suddenly find yourself transported to the birthing site. Indeed, we suspect some midwives have been conducted directly to the bottom of a sea or volcano. As this would rapidly kill them, however, we may guess only by their disappearances.

Nb: Should you yourself be suddenly transported to such a place—a panicked, laboring god snaps their fingers and whoosh! there you are swimming in lava—you will have little left to save you but your thoughts and prayers to a truculent god. For that, we are sorry.

Priority Two: The Babe

Should the opportunity arise, you might be tempted to steal the babe from its parent and raise it yourself. This is not recommended. We know of very few cases where the midwife successfully hid the god-babe for long. Even so, the gods’ wrath proved insurmountable and resulted in, at best, the death of the midwife, and, at worst, extended torture beforehand.

Nb: Merely witnessing some babes may have deleterious effects. These include, but aren’t limited to: falling irrevocably in love with it, transmogrification into an animal or stone—or both—and death. In such cases, however, the birthing god likely has similar abilities, which should encourage you to take the precaution of a blindfold. Forewarned is forearmed, midwife!

Priority Three: The God-Parent

Your last priority is the parent. The one good fortune regarding god-births is that, even in difficult circumstances, the god cannot die. Therefore, your priority here is directly related to your priority of yourself. Charm the god. Tell them how mighty they are to endure the pain, and how strong the babe must be.

You may comment on the babe’s appearance, but here it is imperative to know your audience. Some gods will prefer you to speak of beauty and well-formed limbs, even if the crowning babe sports horns and a forked tongue and the scales of a snake. Other gods will want you to exclaim there have never been sharper hooves, and how well those teeth will gnash.

Nb: If there is a prophecy that the god’s child will prove their downfall, it is better to say the babe looks ill. Usually. Some gods will take umbrage at the implication that a weakling will defeat them, even if you breathe not a word of the prophecy (which, we hope it goes without saying, you should never, ever do).

In any case, the appearance of the god is no clue as to the best approach. You cannot assume that a human-like god will favor human-like beauty, or that a monstrous god will appreciate monstrous traits. Some gods will change their appearance simply to trick you. More rarely, the act of giving birth will render them incapable of controlling their appearance. If you are in doubt as to what the god would like to hear, it’s best to focus on their strength. All gods like to be reminded of how easily they may kill you.

Closing Thoughts

Chances are, if you have been summoned to attend a deity giving birth, you won’t have the option to refuse. But that doesn’t mean you are without power of your own.

In our experience, gods are never so vulnerable as when first born. They are like human babes in this regard: The world outside of their parent’s womb is startling and new. Yours are the first hands that will touch the babe; yours is the first face (even if blindfolded) it will see. Yours is its first worldly influence. Never forget the power inherent in that, midwife. You may speak kindness to the babe, or mercy, or gentleness. God babes have better memories than human babes; even the briefest murmur or the gentlest touch might be remembered and, eventually, acted upon.

That is the full power of the midwife: Through the actions of a moment, you might influence the babe to be a better god than its parent.

But again, do not kidnap it. You will be killed.

Happy—and safe—god-births, midwife! May you survive longer than most.

1166 words

Author’s Note: I wrote the first draft of “Midwifery of Gods” in 2019 for a flash fiction writing challenge, while I was pregnant with my now-toddler. I’d also recently finished reading Madeline Miller’s Circe, which put me in mind of Greek gods, which then also put me in mind of watching Xena and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys during my childhood. In particular, a line from the Hercules opener (though ofc Xena is the superior show) kept running back to me: “… the ancient gods were petty and cruel, and they plagued mankind with suffering.” Well, thought I, how might a mortal midwife be “plagued with suffering”? Though the core of the story was there, I didn’t get around to revisions till 2021 (shoutout to my friend Dawn for her critique!), and a lot of the futility I feel around the crises of the pandemic and climate change filtered into my revisions–as well as the hope parents (or midwives) must feel, for the sake of their children. While changes on an individual level aren’t the equivalent of widespread societal change, inspiring the kids we interact with daily to be better than we are, to be more compassionate and understanding, to encourage them to push beyond the status quo–that’s not nothing, and it’s what I personally lean into to keep going.

Amanda Helms is a biracial science fiction and fantasy writer whose stories have appeared or are forthcoming from Mermaids Monthly, Fireside Fiction, Cast of Wonders, and elsewhere. “Midwifery of Gods: A Primer for Mortals” is her second story in Diabolical Plots. She and her family live in Colorado. Though all of them are natives, none ski or snowboard, proving that such creatures indeed exist.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Amanda Helms’s first story in Diabolical Plots was “The Efficacy of Tyromancy Over Reflective Scrying Methods in Prediction of Upcoming Misfortunes of Divination Colleagues, A Study by Cresivar Ibraxson, Associate Magus, Wintervale University”.

DP FICTION #83A: “Tides That Bind” by Cislyn Smith

Content note (click for details)

Content note: eating disorders

The wifi is out in Scylla’s cave. The four dog heads around her waist whine as she scutter-paces, twelve feet tapping on the cave floor. Scylla wants to check her email. She wants to see if that jerkface troll is still active on the disordered eating board she moderates, and catch up on her feeds, and check the status of her latest online orders, and all the other things she has in her morning routine these days. She stares with half her heads across the water, three long necks stretching toward the mouth of the cave. She is trying to be subtle about it.

She won’t bother Charybdis for this. They used to go for years not speaking—decades sometimes! —and Charybdis loved that silence. She is the ultimate introvert, on her little island of rock. Scylla can wait. It’s fine. She’s had time beyond measure to work on patience.

Across the strait, Charybdis squints against the sun at the restless shadow in the cave. She peels herself off the rock and undulates over to the shelter where she keeps precious things—carved bone and wood mementos, solar panels and electronics, a tea set for guests. There she delicately pokes the router into resetting with one fin.

The whorling motion in the gloomy cave settles as the lights blink back to green. Charybdis smiles a nearly mile-wide grin and goes back to basking.

This is how they are with each other.

They get drone-dropped deliveries, to the rock or the cave mouth. Some things come by crate, floated in on little recyclable rafts that Scylla gleefully pops.

There are no ships. No boats, no tankers, no submarines or skiffs. Not for a very long time. Scylla makes due with copious amounts of fish and protein shakes. The dog heads prefer kibble, but she has standards. She may have ten total mouths, but there’s only one stomach, after all. The kibble is just for special occasions.

She desperately misses eating sailors.

Charybdis has always been a vegetarian. Phytoplankton is her favorite. In copious amounts.

Neither of them really get what they want anymore—the crush crack of wooden ships in the whirlpool, the screams of men. They’ve found better ways to sate their appetites.

Scylla’s typing rate is proportional to her fury. Today, she is expressing bone-crunching anger at BroAcles69, the jerkface of the day. She is working on yet another paragraph about why he should be permabanned (and eviscerated, iced, and delivered to her cave in bite-sized pieces, please and thank you) for how he treated vulnerable community members, when a whine from near her hip breaks her concentration. Charybdis is in the mouth of the cave, half out of the water, watching her.

“How long have you been there?” Scylla spits some of her shark teeth into the bucket by her stool, surprised to find it overflowing. She must have been grinding for a while. All six of her necks are tense and whipcord tight.

Charybdis’s voice is a whisper of gravel. “That’s my line.”

Scylla gestures at the screen, all grasping claws and emotion, eloquence lost as she realizes she’s been at this for days now without a break.

“You take it all too personally. You always have.” Charybdis pushes off the ledge and lets the current take her. Scylla notices then that she brought gifts, just like in the old days—there’s a long twist of sturdy rope for the dog heads to play tug-of-war with, and red nail polish in Scylla’s favorite shade. Best of all, there’s a new pair of boots.

She deletes all but the first seven lines of the screed, posts, and turns away from the computer. He doesn’t deserve any more than that anyway. Charybdis is asking her to come back to the world, and there are new shoes to try on. Scylla flexes the tips of two of her tentacles into the right size and shape for the new boots and smiles. She’ll need to find some suitable gifts, too. This volley will not be unanswered.

Charybdis is coughing off her rock, retching out the sea again. Scylla sits, twelve bare feet all dangling into the rapidly rising water. She scritches Enki and Adapa between the ears, waiting. The waters will be swirling with powerful currents until sunset. It’s been a while since Charybdis drank down too much and had to purge like this—a long while, honestly.

When Charybdis is done, shriveled and shivering on her rock, Scylla counts slowly to a thousand, and then calls across to her in six-voiced unison over the roaring waters between them. “Snack time, Chary.”

She waves fins in an exhausted but complicated looping gesture. It roughly translates to “Leave me alone, I couldn’t possibly eat, ugh, everything is terrible.”

Scylla smiles toothy grins. “I know. But you need your strength. There’s miso soup and a seaweed salad over near the shelter for you. Just a few bites and I’ll leave you be.”

Charybdis relents and slowly slouches toward the food. They’ve learned over the long ages that having something after the purge helps moderate her appetite. It means the next cycle will be slower, gentler. Anything slow and gentle in this world is to be cherished.

Scylla sucks at moderation, herself. Affectionate extremes, though, she excels at. Behind her, the computer dings repeatedly. She ignores it, watching to make sure Charybdis eats, muttering encouragement under her breaths. The monsters in the world will wait. Her friend is what matters, and today, they’ve got this.

900 words

Author’s Note: I studied classical civilizations in college, and have long had a fascination with the monsters of Greek mythology. When I was presented with the prompt “What does the monster think?” for a writing challenge, it didn’t take me long to fall into the what-ifs of Scylla and Charybdis and their long, immortal relationship.

Cislyn Smith is a speculative poet and short story writer who likes playing pretend, playing games, and playing with words. She calls Madison, Wisconsin home. She has been known to crochet tentacles, write stories and poems at odd hours, and gallivant. Her wordy work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Flash Fiction Online. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, a first reader for Uncanny Magazine and GigaNotoSaurus, and one of the founders of the Dream Foundry. She wears a lot of hats both metaphorically and literally.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Cislyn Smith’s story “The Dictionary For Dreamers” has appeared in Diabolical Plots previously.