surreal – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #122A: “The Unfactory” by Derrick Boden

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details)

Mass atrocities

Date: March 10

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Mama’s Pizza & Pasta

I unmade Mama’s Pizza & Pasta today. Single-story, painted brick exterior, swaddled in garish holiday lights all year round. Same two wrought-iron tables chained out front that I used to pass on my way home from Redondo High, where the old-timers would knock back Morettis and dole out dirty jokes on Friday afternoons. Same Mama, too. Poor lady.

In the cold confines of the unmaking chamber, I donned my gear. Oculars to get me there metaphysically, a wraith on the astral breeze; wrought iron needles to tease out the loose threads of reality; hexed gloves to rip that shit apart. I started from the top, like you taught me. The rooftop exhaust fans, sticky from decades of congealed grease. The rust-gnawed floodlights, the decrepit polyurethane sign—along with every memory of every person who’d ever glanced up at it—backdropped by imported palm trees and a smoggy orange moonrise.

Then, with a flick of my hand, the roof. All the furtive moments from all the high school lovers who made out up there in the midsummer heat. Gone. Then the walls, brick by brick, paint chips flecking from the vanishing surface like pastel scabs.

The kitchen was a labor, all those outdated appliances wheezing in the summer heat. Like you said at orientation, old things are hard to forget. So I pried off my oculars and hit the vending machines. By 2 a.m., the kitchen had never existed. I swept through the dining room on a swell of Mountain Dew-induced adrenaline, vanished the foyer without a conscious thought.

I saved the two tables out front for last. Wish I hadn’t. Like you said on day one: biggest risk in this business is nostalgia.

Anyway, the tables are gone.

And for what? What did Mama do to deserve this? Was it something she said in an interview? A politician she snubbed? A customer she refused to seat?

I’ll never know. Can’t know, by design. The coin-op laundromat is shouldered up against the boxing gym now—not an inch of her old curb-space as proof to the contrary. No hard feelings, right? She’ll be back from holiday tomorrow, won’t ever know what she missed. She’s spent her whole life waiting tables at Gino’s, now, never took a chance on her own business. Mama’s Pizza is gone and nobody’s the wiser.

Nobody but me, for a few more minutes. I can’t help but relish the fleeting privilege of being the only person on Earth who knows that which has never been. By the time I hit the street, I’ll be just like everyone else. A lowly worker navigating a tidy world, oblivious to the gloved hands that tug at threads in my periphery.

When it was done, before I pried off my oculars I swept the block for loose ends. A pizza box skidded along the sidewalk, cruel trick of the pre-dawn breeze. Across the street, in the reflection off the laundromat windows, staring at that fleeting singularity where Mama’s never stood: you. Notebook clutched in your hand, scribbling.

By the time I turned, you were gone.

Just like Mama’s.

***

Date: March 22

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Perry Park

I’ll be glad to forget today.

I walk past Perry Park every morning. Used to shoot hoops there, back in junior high. Those old chain nets were so satisfying, the way they throttled the ball before letting it pass through, defying time for a single glorious moment.

What will I remember after I’ve clocked out? You say that when a thing gets unmade, the memories don’t leave a void—they transfigure. Details get slippery, new flesh grown over old wounds. Friendships unravel. Blame gets reassigned; prejudices are reborn. The world forgets a piece of itself. What did I used to do after school? Play basketball. Where did I play? The park. You know, that park.

Same for faces. Like the old man on the bench by the hoops. Sorry, guy. Just following orders.

Still, never unmade a person before.

Or have I? How do I explain those dreams, haunted with faces so familiar yet wholly unknown? A brother, a boyfriend, a daughter they never had. Only way to hang onto the unpast is to smuggle your oculars outside, catch an unmaking in progress. But nobody’s that stupid: the unfactory’s punishment for nostalgia is unerring and swift. At least my own past is protected by contract. Aside from incidental details like Perry Park.

I saw you there before work, in the reflection of a passing windshield, kicking around the baseball diamond where the big kids sling dope. Keeping tabs on me in your notebook.

I did the job, boss. Old man’s gone. His nephews never had an uncle, his partner never married.

Now leave me the fuck alone.

***

Date: March 24

Hours worked: 4.0

Project: Rudolph

It shouldn’t matter. They say dogs don’t have souls, that those droopy wet eyes aren’t sad at all but rather our own tragic compulsion to transpose human emotion onto everything we see. These vanity breeds only live seven years anyhow, and fuck you I’m a cat person.

Fuck you, I’m a cat person.

I only need to type it a few more times, and the hangover of memories will be gone from my mind just like they are from Rudolph’s doting humans, and everyone else besides. I shouldn’t have to type it at all, really, because it’s like you said on day one: can’t be sad about losing a thing that was never there. And a dog, to quote my old neighbor, is—

Now, that was unexpected. I probably shouldn’t be writing this part down, but you taught me to be ruthless with documentation. The deed is done: Rudolph the Dog is no more, unspun from the scraggly end of his tail to the tip of his side-lolling tongue. It barely took half of a shift. My mind had already begun the process of remolding itself when the thought I was typing fell right out of my head. When I glance back at what I wrote, it makes no sense at all. What old neighbor? Someone with a dog, I assume, but beyond that…who knows?

A chill runs through my body. I wrack my brain, but it’s no use. It’s okay, though. Just another incidental detail.

Besides, I’m a cat person.

***

Date: March 30

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Park Manor

Today I unmade Park and West 170th. Strapped on the oculars, pulled the gloves over my trembling hands and vanished a city block. Soup kitchen, pawn shop, four-story affordable housing complex. My biggest project to date, maybe.

The tenants at Park Manor are gone. I work graveyard, so most everyone was asleep. The ones who were out—at the bar or working late shifts—they’ll make my list tomorrow. The unfactory never leaves anything to chance. The ones that were there, I found the loose thread in each of them. Unwove their skin, reclaimed their bones, snuffed out their hearts one by one. Pretty sure the lady in 3C was my sixth-grade English teacher. Can’t be missed if you never existed.

Isn’t that right, boss?

But how many incidental details have I already lost? Why do I search for my car keys when I don’t have a license? Should I remember the name of my first love, or what I wanted to be when I grew up? The faceless mobs that haunt my dreams—are they shadows of an unpast I’ve already erased?

In a tooth of glass from the pawn shop’s busted window, through my oculars tonight, I spotted your reflection. You moved like a listless wraith.

In your eyes I saw the truth.

***

Date: March 31

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Unfactory, South Bay Branch

The city is emaciated. Gaunt. Hollowed out.

Of course, I have no basis for comparison. The things I unmade were never here. Sure, in some archived unpast maybe there was a bakery wedged between that laundromat and that boxing gym. But that’s neither here nor there. And yet, the seams of this place feel overworn. The streets sag against the weight of people they never held.

Fuck it. Our work here is done. The purpose of it all—whether we succeeded or failed—I’ll never know. I unmade the facility today from a mobile chamber across the street. They’re transferring me up north. New digs, fresh faces. They need a veteran to hold down the line. It’s a dangerous path to walk, between experience and liability. Sooner or later, the risk of a lingering memory will outweigh my upside. Old things are hard to forget.

Isn’t that right, boss?

I followed you home last night, on a hunch. Dusted your prints from the keypad, let myself in while you slept. Found your notebook under your pillow. All this time, I thought you were keeping tabs on me. Waiting for me to slip up. You never liked me. Said I lacked humility. Called me ruthless, as if I wasn’t doing exactly what you’d taught me. All this time, I thought you were trying to unmake me. Until yesterday, when I caught a glimpse of you in a reflection.

Wearing your oculars.

There’s only one reason you’d have your gear outside the chamber, and it isn’t to forget. Only one reason that notebook of yours would be warded against unmaking, all frayed and reality-stripped at the edges.

You’ve been keeping secrets. Grasping at threads of the unpast. Tasting that forbidden fruit, nostalgia.

I get it. Really, I do. I’ve been feeling it too, in the dead space between my thoughts. All those incidental details. When we’re made to forget, it isn’t to clear room for new things. We become lesser versions of ourselves. Maybe someday I’ll be the one haunting the reflections of the unmade. Scrounging for memories of a better past, with familiar smiles and unfamiliar names. But not today.

You see, I read your notebook. The lists, the addresses, the profiles. Everything you’ve directed me to unmake. All the incidental connections to my own life. Every street, building, and park. Every dog, every person.

A brother.

A boyfriend.

A daughter I never had.

Not very incidental after all. Maybe nothing is. The contract is well-crafted bullshit, I guess, and your notebook is more than nostalgia. It’s a confession. It’s everything you took from me, bound up and tucked under your pillow so you can sleep at night. It’s a blueprint for the monster you crafted of me. A monster to do your bidding, to keep your own hands clean.

Problem is, you crafted me too well. So of course I sliced a warded sheet out of that notebook, made sure it found its way into the evidence drawer posthaste. You know I’m ruthless about documentation.

I checked the logs before I strapped on my oculars today. You were the only one on-site, and there was no evacuation order given. The unfactory never leaves anything to chance. Neither do I.

I’m sure you were a pawn all the same, and I should be picking bones with your bosses instead. But I’m cold with jealousy for a life I never lived, and I crave the easy burn of retribution—before that, too, is lost to the enduring sieve of time.

On the bright side, nobody will miss you.

I promise.

1890 words

Author’s Note: Sometimes I like to take two unrelated ideas and mash them together. Here, I had idea #1: write a story with a narrative structure that’s menial and dull—in this case a daily work log—but in the context of something horrific. Even the apocalypse needs project managers, right? And idea #2: write a story that raises the question, “Which is worse: to forget, or be forgotten?” By the time I was done, The Unfactory was a little bit of both ideas, a little bit of neither, and hopefully still a little bit coherent.

Derrick Boden’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, and elsewhere. Derrick is a Sturgeon Award-nominated writer, a software developer, an adventurer, and a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2019. He currently calls Boston his home, although he’s lived in fourteen cities spanning four continents. He is owned by two cats and one iron-willed daughter. Find him at derrickboden.com and on Twitter as @derrickboden.

If you enjoyed the story you might want to read Derrick Boden’s previous story here in Diabolical Plots: “Giant Robot and the Infinite Sunset”. 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 #97D: “A Girl With a Planet In Her Eye” by Ruth Joffre

This story is part of our special telepathy issue, Diabolical Thoughts, edited by Ziv Wities.
Click here for the entire Diabolical Thoughts transmission.

For the first thirteen years of her life, the planet was silent. No birdsong. No construction. Only the gentle sway of an ocean pushing and pulling against the aqueous humors of her left eye. Late at night, while her parents slept, she often lay awake and listened to the dense water solidify itself, the salts forming crystals, the crystals becoming pillars in a great, cavernous hall populated at first by no one, and then: music. A pure, high note so sudden it woke her from her slumber and conjured the image of a miniature flautist performing deep in the canal of her ear. Only the sound was part of her, she realized—the first beat in a rhythm she had been unknowingly teaching these crystals as they coalesced in the spaces between words and breaths. Her body was their language. Her heartbeats, her sneezes. Her haphazard attempts to mirror her mother’s Spanish. The crystals absorbed it all and played her life back to her to say: We’re here. We exist.

If she closed her eyes and listened, she could hear them communicate with each other. Mi nombre es Adagio. I’m Sharp. I’m Grave. I should eat. I must. I am. They fed on light through her pupil, synthesizing crystalline energies. Sunlight was best, then moonshine, then fluorescent, incandescent, and halogen. Only when starving would they eat the light from her phone, that pale ethereal glow providing no nutrients, no sustenance—just a desperate act of survival. Go outside, the crystals would shout when she stared at the screen too long, and once outside she would have to stay there an hour, maybe two, to feed them. Hungry crystals clamoring in the dark.

She hated to hear them shatter. All the little pieces lodging in the planet’s crust.

Her eye was becoming a graveyard.

Her crystals were outgrowing their castles. No one would say it out loud, but she knew. It was painfully obvious in the way their bodies hummed at night, that sullen way they poked at the crumbling pillars in the great halls, the way kids kick at pine cones, knowing how much potential for life they once held.

After so many years, she knew what they were thinking: More light.

I’m hungry.

I have to get out of here.

She didn’t know any ophthalmologists, nor any crystallographers, and when she thought of looking for one, the crystal bodies vibrated with panic, broken prisms in a microscopic lattice. No photographs, their humming said. No petri dishes, no tuning forks, no experiments. Through her, they had seen too many movies about encounters with extraterrestrial life; they knew that their sentience would be a death sentence. That in the absence of predators to keep it in line humanity viewed all other intelligence as an existential threat to its self-image. She could not allow scientists to poke and prod and strike a tuning fork to determine the exact frequency necessary to shatter the crystals from within and eliminate the enemy.

No, she would have to extract the planet on her own.

It should be simple enough. According to the internet, ophthalmologists routinely poked holes under patient eyelids to drain the eye of excess fluid and, thus, relieve the pressure that caused glaucoma. She could do much the same with only a hypodermic needle and the eye patch from last Halloween’s costume, which would help speed recovery.

While taping open her eyelids, she soothed the crystals with simple chatter. Did you know the human eye heals faster than almost any other part of the human body? An anatomical marvel produced by millions of years of evolution. Imagine the injuries my ancestors must have had and healed from; imagine their wonder in looking up into the mouth of a saber tooth tiger. The blood! The carnage! Just a little pinch. She slid the needle in so easily it frightened her. She thought the process would be more painful, the planet more difficult to extract from the universe of her body, but it just slipped out of her like a tear, all that salt whispering away before she could think to say wait.

How will I know if you survive this?

She felt the loss like a gulf opening between them. A great silence where once was music.

Is this death? She could not know. All she could do was inject the aqueous fluid from her eye into the tiny glass snow globe she had drained and refilled with saline. If the planet settled (if without the benefit of her gravity it careened through the snow globe, ricocheting off the walls as inertia drew it inexorably to the floor), she could not say. Its new container was still and quiet, no humming, no vibration. Just a pinprick, a miniscule glint of light, like a rainbow before it decides to form. Give it time, she told herself. Her planet might have survived and her crystals might well be growing in the happy medium of saline. She hoped so.

She set the snow globe down gently. Tucked it behind a potted plant on the windowsill so it would always get enough light.

And then she waited, dreaming of the day the crystals were big enough to say hi.

870 words

Author’s Note: To be perfectly honest, the title of the story comes from something my girlfriend said while we were cuddling: that a reflection in my glasses made it look like there was a planet in my eye. Obviously, I had to turn that phrase into a story! What would life be like for a girl with a planet in her eye? The story went through a couple false starts—a Star Trek: The Next Generation-inspired crystalline entity, a scary foray into the world of surveillance biometrics—before I landed on this more intimate, personal approach. Often, when we write about something growing inside us, it turns into a story of illness as invasion or pregnancy as body horror (see also: Alien). In this story, I wanted to counter that trend with something both haunting and fulfilling. Something, ultimately, hopeful.

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She co-organized the performance series Fight for Our Lives and served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House. In 2023, she will be a visiting writer at University of Washington Bothell.

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