Wild Musette Journal

by Gretchen Tessmer

something about us seems damned—

to repeat myself

I’d have to walk half a city block

and then I’d have to scream at traffic

(it’s demeaning and utterly melodramatic)  

all the while 

pedestrian crossings line up so parallel 

so perfect

all meanderings dismissed to other times

in demi-monde places, where grass grows up

between old wheel ruts

dew-dropped mornings with blue violets 

and pink clover  

where wrought iron gates stay locked

and tightly shut

(but, in the end

are simply climbed over)

Gretchen Tessmer is an attorney and writer based in the U.S./Canadian borderlands of Northern New York. She writes both poetry and short fiction. Her work has appeared in Nature, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Wild Musette, among many other venues.

by Melissa Crandall

After the call came with news of her father’s death, Bryn stood on her apartment stoop three thousand miles away, sipping a tepid beer, and stared at the Cascades rising against the sky. Images from the past played against the line of mountains. Her chest felt empty, hollow as the Tin Man of Oz. Not with grief, but with its absence.

She didn’t attend the funeral, not even as a distant spectator hidden behind the line of trees at the rear of the cemetery. When the lawyer contacted her a week later to say that she—Bryn—was sole beneficiary of the small estate, she felt nothing, certainly not gratitude. She’d stayed away for ten years. What did any of it matter?

She considered hiring an agent to assess the value of what had been left and auction it off. Any proceeds could be donated to LGBTQ rights or some other charitable organization her father would have loathed. Instead, she booked a flight she couldn’t afford, packed a small bag, and headed east.

Her hometown had changed more than she realized. The quaint coffee shops, independent bookstores, and eclectic mom-and-pop emporiums she remembered from childhood had expired beneath an onslaught of big-name enterprises and nail salons. Even the library—a squat brick building cozy as a hug, where she’d spent long hours hiding among the stacks rather than going home—had been replaced by a sprawling, modern monstrosity. Traffic that had once rolled smoothly along Broadway now progressed by inches, horns blaring as impatient drivers jockeyed aggressively for parking spaces at the crowded curb. It was a relief to turn onto the side streets and wend her way toward the old neighborhood.

She parked the rental car in the driveway and sat for a long time just looking at the house. It wasn’t much—a small two-bedroom, one-bath Cape with faded yellow siding, white trim, and a front yard the size of a postage stamp. Red geraniums bloomed in boxes along the porch rail. It all seemed so normal that she half expected the Old Man to appear.

For a moment, she actually saw it happen—saw the door open, saw her father step out onto the porch in his trademark khaki work pants and plaid shirt, saw a broad hand lift—and then Bryn shuddered and the vision fractured into sunlight and leaf-shadow.

She bit her lip, a habit she thought she’d left behind, and reconsidered the wisdom of coming here. “Don’t be stupid,” she muttered. “He’s dead. It’s over.” She emerged from the car; closed the door. The day was warm, dry, and pleasant; the neighborhood quiet but for the distant burr of a lawnmower and the shouts of children at play. She removed a key from beneath a garden gnome—some things never changed—and unlocked the side door.

As it swung open, she was unaccountably assailed by a memory of Elizabeth—who’d moved out last month after a year together, explaining her departure by accusing Bryn of being cold, detached from everyone and everything; pleasant enough on the surface “but there’s nothing inside, no real warmth.” Elizabeth had cried as she spoke. “I try and try to reach you, but you never reach back.”

Bryn had remained silent throughout, not knowing what to say. Afterward, she’d cleaned the apartment, arranged her belongings to cover the absence of her lover’s things, and phoned for a take-out order from the local Chinese restaurant.

❦

Sunlight slanted through the window above the kitchen sink, lighting a swirl of dust motes disturbed by fresh air from the open door. The curtains were the same pale yellow gingham her mother had hung right before she left, packing a suitcase and disappearing one night while her ten-year-old daughter slept and her husband worked the late shift.

Bryn moved deeper into the house rather than consider the old, unanswered questions of her mother’s abandonment. Everywhere she looked, things were exactly as they’d been when she ran away at sixteen—the green recliner parked before the television, the plaid couch in front of the windows, the rolltop desk, end tables, and lamps. She remembered the night of her departure vividly: the shouting, the fight. She’d struck the Old Man, something she’d never dared do before, and run like hell. It hadn’t been easy living on the streets—no money, eating from dumpsters, walking and hitching from place to place, always heading west—but it was better than remaining here and, anyway, she’d made it work out.

She opened the desk and sifted through its contents, uncertain what she might be looking for. The drawers contained neat files of bills paid, her father’s army records, and other detritus collected over sixty-one years of life. Nothing of interest.

A photo of Bryn and her mother, taken on vacation at some lake she barely recalled, sat in a plastic frame atop the desk. In the picture she was maybe seven, which put her mother in her early thirties. They wore bathing suits—Mom’s naked shoulders hunched, Bryn’s pale arms slender and unmarked—and looked unhappy, belying the sunlit water behind them.

She moved into the hallway, walls lined with aged paneling, floor covered in worn carpet her feet could read like Braille, and stopped at the closed door of her bedroom. She touched the scuffed brass knob hesitantly, then turned it and let the door swing inward.

She wasn’t certain what she’d expected to find, but it wasn’t this shrine to the girl she’s been. The bed was made up with the same quilted spread, the windows with the same bland wheat-colored curtains. Dusted shelves were lined with plastic models of spaceships, some dog-eared novels, and a few favorite children’s books—How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Sun-faded posters of Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver decorated the walls along with faded felt pennants for the Minnesota Twins and Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish.

Bryn stared. Might her father actually have missed her once she’d gone? Had he regretted what happened between them? Would she have forgiven him if he was?

“Not a chance.” Her voice sounded loud in the tomb-like stillness of the house. Closing the door, she continued down the hall past the bathroom tiled in 1950s-era pink and black, to the bedroom where her father had died, and halted in the open doorway.

The room appeared disconcertingly lived-in, a shirt and pair of pants draped over the chair, the bedclothes thrown back where the paramedics had left them. Once more, Bryn experienced that odd psychic frisson, as if her father’s ghost might suddenly appear clad in his habitual sleepwear, an old white undershirt and baggy cotton boxers.

She went first to the bedside stand. Nasal spray, eye drops, a pair of reading glasses. She moved to the dresser, opening one drawer after another to root through the contents. Underwear and socks. Two neckties. An old wristwatch and a narrow case containing army insignia. Tee shirts and sweatshirts. An orange pasteboard box loosely tied with twine opened to reveal the knit stocking Bryn had hung on the fireplace each year for Santa to fill.

She opened the closet door. Footwear neatly lined the floor: sneakers and boots, dress shoes missing, having undoubtedly gone into the ground with dear old Dad. The shelf above held a fedora, rarely worn, and a stained Yankees ball cap. The rail hung with slacks and khakis, two jackets, casual button-downs, and polos. A faint odor of Old Spice aftershave clung to the cloth like a persistent memory.

With an abrupt motion, Bryn swept the hangers aside…

…and discovered her heart; pericardium opened with surgical precision but the organ itself intact, inferior vena cava and thoracic aorta dangling from the bottom. The superior vena cava, aorta, and pulmonary veins and arteries were bunched together at the top like flower stalks, a grisly bouquet bound by ugly black leather; a belt, slightly warped from having cinched the same waist for so many years, the buckle caught by one corner around a nail driven into the wall at the back of the closet.

She remembered that belt and how light had raced along the buckle’s sharp edge as it swung high and slashed down; what it felt like striking her flesh, tearing it, leaving the scars Elizabeth had learned not to ask about. Ten years on, Bryn understood that none of it was her fault, but still she struggled to breathe past the visceral panic engendered by the sight of that strap.

You make me so mad. I wouldn’t do this if you didn’t make me mad.

The heart pulsed, a single beat.

Bryn gasped. It couldn't be alive, not after so long. Her eyes must be playing tricks, fooled by a stray beam of sunlight through the bedroom window hitting the bureau mirror and reflecting into this dark space where something of her had remained—it was difficult to think lived—all these years.

The heart beat twice, as if gaining strength from her presence. Did it remember her?

Jaw clenched, Bryn stepped into the closet and with careful hands loosened the overhand knot that bound the organ. It took time and effort; the belt leather had dried and shrunk, making its hold on her heart difficult to undo. Eventually, it slid apart and the heart dropped into her hands. Cradling it against her chest, she walked through the house and out to the car, into the sunlight and warmth, where she picked up her cell phone and dialed Elizabeth, hoping she would accept the call so Bryn could tell her everything, at last.

Melissa Crandall writes fantasy, dark fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Tricks and Treats: A Collection of Spooky Stories by Connecticut Authors, Allegory online magazine, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. She is the author of three science fiction media tie-in novels. A nonfiction book, The Man Who Loved Elephants, is currently under consideration. She lives in Connecticut, where she spends her free time cooking, gardening, and beating her husband at Scrabble.

melissacrandall.com

by Jeff Wood

His dress shirt was missing the top two buttons.

After he left, she kept the shirt hanging in the back of the closet, where no one else could see it. No one but her.

He had left the shirt behind because of the missing buttons. One of their first nights together she had straddled him, loosed his tie, and then ripped his shirt open, the buttons popping off as she bit his chest. He rolled over on top of her, quickly peeling off his shirt as she watched with glee, the buttons scattering into the dark corners of the room, never to be found. She had looked, many times.

It became a joke between them, how she was going to sew the buttons back on one day. She was a horrible seamstress. And the buttons were long gone.

She lay on the bed with the shirt sometimes, when she would think of him. He always told her how much he loved the smell of her, the perfume, the lotion, the shampoo, the heady mix of it. But those were all conscious decisions, scents deliberately added by her.

He wore no cologne, no body wash, no fragrance of any kind. Still, he had a scent. A complex scent, but guileless and organic. Made of sweat, of bath soap and generic shampoo. The almonds he’d snack on at work. The stupid pine tree air freshener in his car (another private joke between them). The occasional secret puff on a cigar.

The scent of him. It was simply the scent of him. Nothing added.

She took the shirt off its hanger at the back of the closet, as she had so many times before. She dragged it behind her, as if it were a heavy weight she could not lift. She fell onto the bed and wrapped the shirt around her shoulders, losing herself not just in the smell of it but the warp of the cloth, the feel of the fabric. Her fingers played with the two empty buttonholes at the top of the shirt, the buttonholes matched by no button, empty, awaiting closure.

Jeff Wood lives in Colorado with his two daughters and three  cats. He has had over twenty short stories published in print magazines and online publications such as Boston Phoenix, New York Press, Camas: The Nature of the West, Fiction at Work, Six Sentences, Everyday Weirdness, The Greyrock Review, Bellowing Ark, tomlit, CRATE, Java Journal, and Clifton. He also has a children's play included in the anthology CHILDSPLAY, in the company of such authors as Sam Shepard and Maya Angelou. When not writing he spends way too much time staring at the night sky.

by Brian Koukol

In the fertile flats of Oceano, nestled between windswept dunes and a eucalyptus-laden mesa on California's Central Coast, stood a field of rich alluvial soil—a celery field, little changed from its first incarnation nearly one hundred years earlier.

For most around these parts, that was as far back as things went, though a few of the historically inclined might speak of Mexican land grants and sprawling dairy farms. Like the rest of the country, they shared in a collective amnesia regarding the existence and displacement of its aboriginal inhabitants—here called Chumash, the Seashell People.

Ten thousand years earlier, a dying Chumash shaman, living within a cave in the looming mesa, convinced Hutash, the Earth Mother, to imbue a string of beads with the power of his waning life force. Over time, the wind and the rain conspired to scatter those beads across the alluvial plain below, finally depositing one particular bead in one particular future celery field.

There it sat, buried, until a century of agriculture exhumed it, finally pressing it against a transplant of Conquistador 1703, a promising cultivar of Tall Utah 52-75, and thereby granting one particular celery plant the sentience of a Chumash soul.

❦

At first, his world consisted of taste alone. Urea. Potash. Phosphates. Mycorrhizal fungi. These associations were innate, as was his name. Pascal.

The onset of touch and balance confirmed that Pascal was buried headfirst in the alluvium. He wanted out.

Manipulating the turgor of his leafy ribs, Pascal bent them to the mounded soil and dug. Scratch by scratch, he clawed free of his silty grave, eventually toppling into the trough between his row and the next.

Pascal glanced up, seeing without recognizable eyes. Shady ranks of his photosynthetic fellows stretched for the sky to either side, vying for escape in the only available direction of up.

The rootlets on the ball of his head twitched, tasting the air. Salt air, yes, but another sort of salt as well.

Sweat.

Human sweat.

And there it was, working its way down the row, straight toward him. It wore dusty jeans and a bulky sweatshirt with the hood up. A bandanna wrapped its face. It was a woman.

Without questioning the source of this knowledge, Pascal accepted it as fact, and therefore as real as what came next.

To his horror, the woman grabbed the striving leaves of the celery plant nearest her and decapitated it at the soil line with one swing of her merciless blade. A second slice amputated its leafy feet. Then, into a cardboard mass grave labeled "Celery Hearts" went the corpse, forgotten.

A quick count put half a dozen of the condemned between Pascal and an ignominious dismemberment. The pitiless field hand dispatched them in seconds. There was no time to formulate a plan. There was no time to even stand up.

The woman stopped above him, inspecting. She bent down and grabbed one of his eleven rib-legs, yanking him into the air. Uncertain of how to react, he did the first thing that popped into his celery root head. He went limp.

As his once-firm ribs slumped with a quick manipulation of turgor pressure, the woman frowned and her tired brown eyes shifted to something behind him. In an instant, he was airborne, flying through the dusty sea breeze. Then he was not.

He crashed into the bed of a worn utility trailer, atop the bodies of a score of his fellows. Agony burned through one of his outer legs—the violent impact had snapped it halfway through.

As beads of his internal fluid dripped onto the unfortunates beneath him from the fresh wound, another head of celery crashed onto him from a new direction, pinning him into place.

Struggling to free himself, he took a peek at the dying weight above him. Tight clusters of white flowers extended beyond his comrade's leafy feet. The poor bastard had bolted, racing to pass on its seed before the machete took its head.

Another corpse fell from the sky and Pascal was struck by a sudden insight, as if gifted from the ether. In an instant, he understood the purpose of the growing pile. It was the soup wagon. He'd been dumped with all the other uglies and undesirables, destined for the commercial broth factory.

Pascal shivered in horror. The thought of boiling alive while his very essence was stolen to appease the discriminating palettes of stubborn human children was too much.

A third and fourth plant joined the pregnant one, equally inert. Their fluids dripped among the stalks, trickling through the maze of limbs until finally reaching Pascal's rootlets. The salty minerality of their juices overwhelmed his senses. Had he such a reflex, he would've gagged, expunging the contents of a nonexistent digestive system.

Aghast at his present circumstances, he flexed his limbs, hoping to wriggle free. The dwindling water of his fellows above and that which oozed from his own wounds served as lubricant, but it wasn't enough. He needed strength that his little body couldn't possibly provide.

In a last ditch effort, he rocked his heavy head up and down, hoping to squeeze forward enough for gravity to do the rest and drag him to the ground below. Bit by painful bit, as the dog pile of death expanded its charnel grasp, he slid on the final gift of the martyrs above until he finally broke free and fell with a moist slap to a drying patch of amended soil.

He lay there for a moment, utterly spent. The shade of the wagon afforded him a hint of protection, but he had to keep moving. There was no telling how the field hands might react if they spotted him. Fear, he knew, was the main driving force of the worst in humanity.

Not willing to waste a moment, he respired, converting his store of photosynthates to useful energy, and took off running.

The humans were all behind him, having already cleared this part of the field, but he stuck to the relative protection of the trench anyway. Without the benefit of his broken, seeping leg, he still had ten more that could spirit him away and he used them to the fullest.

All the world narrowed to the trench, his leafy feet, flight. Then, as the sandy berm that marked the edge of the field came into view, he slipped on a wet patch and tumbled to the dirt. Cursing his clumsiness, he unwound his twisted legs and glared at the puddle that had tripped him up. But the soil was dry.

Suddenly, he understood. In his rush, he had overheated and begun transpiring through the leaves of his feet. The resultant moisture had served as the slick that dropped him.

He'd have to be more careful, he decided as he tried to stand up. Tried, being the operative word. His rib-legs buckled beneath his weight in the effort and he collapsed back onto his face. Confusion quickly skewed to the obvious. So much water had transpired out of him that his turgidity had suffered. The upshot was that his now-floppy legs were useless, at least until he could find a source of fresh water.

He crawled up the adjacent row to assess the immediate area and froze. It was a massacre. An extermination. A pogrom.

The exposed white necks of his decapitated cousins jutted out from perfectly mounded rows that stretched in all directions. Severed leaves and ribs dotted the wasteland like devil's confetti, but what stood out to Pascal the most was the clinical calculation of it all. The rows were so straight, so unerring. The buried heads, so evenly distributed. In the distance, a small shape dug up those heads one at a time. Probably a child.

It was madness. He had to get out of this field.

To that end, he rolled down into the trench and dragged himself, inch by torturous inch, toward the sandy berm that had seemed so close only a few moments earlier. By the time he crested it, his legs were absolutely useless, having shed most of their scant remaining water during the painstaking journey.

Pascal wasn't one for giving up, but he scarcely had the turgidity to lift his head and peer down into the hidden land that now stretched out before him. Exhausting the rest of his energy, he did so, taking in what could be the last view of his short life.

❦

Of water.

Sweet water, meandering along a crude catchment canal.

Ignoring any threat of drowning, Pascal wriggled his way over the lip of the berm and tumbled down the dirt slope. He splashed into the water, but didn't panic. It was shallow—perhaps only four or five inches in depth.

He propelled himself to the far shore and rolled onto his head, thrusting his floppy and uncooperative legs out of the water as best he could. They soon grew appreciably stiffer and stronger as his submerged rootlets absorbed their fill of the invigorating liquid.

His thirst quenched, he let his leaves photosynthesize for a bit, storing energy for the next leg of the journey. Now all he needed was a destination.

Where was a sentient celery plant supposed to go in a world scarred and shaped by a metastatic humanity? How had he come to be? What was his purpose?

Pascal had scarcely begun to cogitate on these imponderables when a noise above the surface distracted him. His revitalized limbs dug into the shore and dragged his body out of the water and onto the dirt with ease.

On the opposite side of the catchment canal stood a crow. It cocked its head at him and squawked.

Pascal thought it looked a right handsome bird, but an instinctual unease tickled at the corners of his improbable mind. He backed away from it, climbing the slope that led out of the canal.

A second crow was waiting for him at the top.

This nearer bird took several hops toward him, no doubt sizing him up. Pascal did the same. He was taller than the crow and armed with many more limbs, but lacked both the gift of flight and that terrifying beak.

The crow squawked twice and Pascal heard the flutter of wings below him. Before he could react, a black blur smashed into him from his flank, throwing him to the dirt.

Stunned, he tried to get back to his feet, but was knocked down again. Then he saw the beak, slicing through the air. It hit him in an outer leg, impaling the limb and then withdrawing with a mouthful of stringy celery meat.

Pascal writhed in agony as the bird hit him again and again. Soon enough, the second had joined in. And a third, shrieking and flapping and stabbing.

Outraged at this treatment, Pascal lashed out with every leg still working and startled the birds into a reprieve. Not one to waste such a moment, he sprang to his feet, scanning for any avenue of escape.

A linear screen of enormous eucalyptus trees stood sentinel not far off. He sprinted toward them. The birds squawked behind him in fury, regrouping.

As he reached the trees, he spotted a tall wooden fence just beyond and scrambled for it. Black blurs darted all around him, screeching. Distracted, he bounced into the fence and fell onto his face.

The birds struck immediately, skewering him with their beaks, pulverizing him. Once again, he lashed out with all of his limbs, but this time managed to scare off only two of the fiends.

The third was more than a match for him. It stabbed at his head, connecting and ripping out a chunk, but chafed at the taste and returned to his legs.

His broken leg.

For Pascal, the move was fortuitous. The next peck severed the limb, which provided a welcome distraction for the bird.

Temporarily freed, though bracing against the pain of injury, Pascal hobbled along the fence line, looking for any way through. Wingtips darted behind him. The two other crows were coming back.

And then he found it—a depression in the dirt that curved beneath a hinged section of the fence. He jumped into the hole, hoping to pop out on the other side of the barrier in safety, but it was not to be. The other side of the promising tunnel had collapsed.

He was trapped.

Any hopes that the relentless crows might not follow him underground were quickly dashed. Two of the three squeezed in after him, pecking and probing and forcing him against the collapse. He slapped at their faces, trying to drive them off, but they kept coming.

Running out of options, he dug into the soil wall against his back and flung a clod of dirt at the mass of black feathers and blacker intentions. One of the birds faltered, weakening the onslaught for an instant, but it soon returned in earnest. Still, an opportunity had presented itself.

Pascal scratched into the dirt with as many arms as he could spare and threw it at the birds. Feathers and screeches exploded in a fit of rage and apprehension, though the latter quickly won out. The birds backed off, but refused to leave the tunnel. Heartened by the partial success, Pascal continued his barrage, knocking the birds back with each salvo until they finally relented and scampered off.

The victory, however, proved only short-lived. The pair had scarcely disappeared when the third one took their place.

Pascal tossed a leaf-full of dirt in its face. The shot struck true, but didn't faze the bird. It shrugged off the blow and lunged at him, smashing its terrifying beak into his stringy meat.

He threw handful after handful at the implacable attacker, trying to drive it off, but it wouldn't relent. It had tasted celery and now nothing else would do.

There was no place for Pascal to go, no way for him to defend himself. Not for the first time this day, he prepared for death while defying it to the last.

❦

The rootlets on Pascal's head tasted something unexpected. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, yes, but also something much more promising.

Grass.

He looked up. A small beam of sunlight filtered through from the top of the collapse. A way out.

Dedicating all his limbs to the task, he clawed at the hole, flinging the spoil at his corvine pursuer. The second the opening was wide enough, he dragged himself through, rolling onto a dewy carpet of prickly fescue.

Scarcely able to muster energy enough for movement, he nevertheless turned his head to the hole. Nothing but darkness. The crow hadn't followed him through.

He lay there, photosynthesizing and respiring, storing energy and burning it, oblivious to the rest of the world.

Until the rest of the world reasserted itself.

A squawk above drew his attention. Fear and pain and futility flashed across his mind, but he managed to identify the source despite it. The three birds, bits of his body still clinging to their hungry mouths, were perched atop the fencing.

Curiously, they didn't come after him. They just stood there, chatting amongst themselves, parried.

Pascal stood up, investigating the yard. The grass was well manicured, bounded on three sides by rough flower beds of golden poppies and Mexican sage. Standing in a place of honor at the center of the sprawling yard loomed a stately valley oak, a cracked tire swing suspended from one eerie limb.

But he didn't care much about all that. Much more troubling were the heaping piles of dog excrement that surrounded him.

Then, the bark.

Directly behind him.

And not a little bark, either. No, this dog would be a monster.

Pascal turned around, slowly, and then sagged.

It was huge.

And playful.

The dog bowed, dropping to its chest with its hind end still in the air. Liver and roan stained its wire-haired coat. Oversized ears twitched in expectation. Droplets of water fell from shaggy beard and lolling pink tongue.

This was no mere crow. This thing could crack him in half with a single crunch.

Pascal ran.

It was, in hindsight, a terrible move.

The dog pounced, knocking Pascal onto his face and pinning him with a gigantic, bristly paw. Then, the teeth.

Pascal cringed, expecting the worst, but the dog had an exceedingly soft mouth. The muzzle cinched around him, hot and wet, but didn't squeeze. Still, it was a dog, and wont to play with its food.

With a snap of its neck, the beast flung him into the air. It was a long arc, end over end, and it finished ugly.

Pascal smashed against the hard concrete of a patio, well clear of the soft grass. Strings sundered. Limbs cracked. Precious water flowed.

Despite the crippling agony, Pascal rose to his feet. A few more tosses like that and he would be done for, shattered. Now was his last chance for escape.

The first thing he saw was a large glass door embedded in the wall of the house. Abutting it was a second panel, this one with a rectangular flap in it. It was the only way inside.

Pascal ran for it.

The dog, galloping in excited circles around the yard, noticed the movement and broke after it. Pascal heard the thundering feet, the loping gait as it chased him down. The flap was right in front of him. It would be close. He leapt.

A second later, the walls shook with a violent crash.

Behind him.

He was through.

The dog, narrowly missing Pascal, had struck the frame surrounding the flap and been rebuffed. It was only a temporary situation, however. Pascal sized up the flap and compared it to the size of the animal. The beast would probably fit through. In fact, the flap was probably purpose-built for it.

Pascal's head start was negligible, but it was something. He needed to make the most of it. Since there was no time to think, he acted, ducking behind the nearest object that screened the flap—a bank of kitchen cabinets.

But hiding wasn't enough. He glanced up at the countertop above him. Verticality would be his only refuge from the dog. He needed to get up.

A pair of portable wooden steps, made for something with short legs, beckoned from the far side of the kitchen.

Pascal had short legs.

Pascal scrambled for the steps.

Halfway there, the flap sounded behind him. Then, the scratching tap of dog toenails. It was inside too.

Pascal threw himself at the steps, somersaulting in the air and grabbing the second, higher tread. From there, he stretched for the top of a drawer face and hoisted himself up.

With his head now hanging from his flexing arms, he spotted the dog lope into the kitchen. It had found him.

There was only one more handhold before the safety of the countertop—a breadboard built into the cabinet. Pascal grabbed it with six arms, all that were completely functional, and pulled, aiming to propel himself out of danger.

Soft teeth and a softer mouth enveloped his head and tugged. The smell was terrible, like rotten fish and guano. Pascal fought against the beast, adding the negligible strength of his remaining limbs to the struggle. They were crippled, some of them hopelessly, but they were all he had in reserve. The countertop was right above him. He was so close. For once, things had to go his way.

Then the dog jerked against him. Hard.

Its light tug had been nothing but play, Pascal realized as he lost his pathetic grip on the breadboard and tumbled down to the tile floor and the mercy of the enthusiastic cur.

❦

"Bailey!"

It was a woman's voice. The dog froze.

"What are you doing in here? You've tracked dirt all over creation! And what do you have in your mouth?"

Stubbornly holding onto Pascal, the dog dropped its head, but refused to loosen its jaws.

"What does he have?" a little voice asked. It belonged to a small boy standing three steps behind the woman.

"Celery, of course," she said. "Looks like he got into the fields again and dragged something back. Damn it, I just filled that hole back in."

The boy covered his mouth with his hand, but she ignored it, instead pointing a finger at the dog.

"Leave it," she said.

Bailey obliged, dropping Pascal to the cold tile.

"Good boy." She patted the dog on the head and snatched up Pascal. "Jesus," she said, inspecting him.

"What's wrong with it?" the kid asked.

"Bailey did a number on it. Looks like the birds had at it too. It's all busted up and broken."

She walked Pascal back to the stepstool and tossed him onto the countertop above it. Verticality wouldn't help him here. He had to play dead.

"Why are you keeping it if it's broken?" the kid asked, trudging after her.

"We can save it for stock. But don't worry about it, let's get you that snack you wanted. What would you like?"

"Celery."

"Of course you do," the woman said.

She walked toward the refrigerator.

"No. I want Bailey's celery."

"Well, you can't have it. It's mangled and full of dog germs. We've got some fresh hearts in the fridge. You can have those."

"Ants on a log?"

"Yeah. Ants on a log."

Pascal sprawled on the counter, respiring and recovering, while the woman dug into the refrigerator. She removed two ribs of celery, the feet having been amputated after a field decapitation, and brought them to the counter in front of him. There, she cut the limbs into four pieces each with a paring knife.

He watched, powerless, as the teardrops of their nutrient-rich waters beaded up and dribbled from the sites of the heinous wounds. Next, the woman smeared a paste of pulverized peanut meat along the concave grooves of the quartered legs and dotted them with the shriveled husks of several desiccated grapes.

While she did this, the boy climbed onto a tall stool at a section of the counter modified into a casual table and waited. The second she dropped the dressed and stuffed corpses in front of him, he picked off the shriveled grapes and then dredged out the peanut smear with a rigid index finger. It took him a while to swallow it all, but, as soon as he finished, he turned his attention to the celery.

Stubby kid fingers pried loose a single string from the amputation site. Pascal braced against imagined screams as the boy flayed the limb, ever so slowly, from stem to stern.

Creaking, squealing, weeping.

The boy's eyes were wide, his tongue extended in concentration.

Still, the flaying.

When finally the horror abated, the little sadist set right to work on a second string.

More creaking. More squealing.

The repetition of the sound cut through Pascal's exhausted ambivalence, driving him to act, if only to roll away from the needless desecration of the dead.

The woman caught the movement in her peripheral vision. He could feel her eyes boring into the back of his pockmarked head as she no doubt attempted to convince herself that it had only been her imagination.

She must've succeeded, because she picked him up and carried him to the sink. Once there and at her mercy, Pascal could do nothing but endure as she turned on the ice cold water and forced it into every one of his soiled crevices.

He bristled against the chill, but tried his best to absorb every drop of the water that came in contact with his thirsty rootlets. He didn't know when he would again have such a chance, so he made the best of it, even though the most likely scenario would have him bubbling in a stockpot soon thereafter.

As she washed the filth from him, she snapped off the lower ends of several broken limbs and he blacked out.

When he came to, much of him draped in a sodden paper towel and all of him blinded by a searing white light, all he could feel was bitter cold. Wriggling away from the brightness, he managed a glimpse at a glass mausoleum of embalmed cucumbers as the refrigerator door slammed shut in his face, thrusting him into utter darkness.

❦

Pascal couldn't move, and not just because of the damp chill which numbed his limbs and the soggy paper towel that enveloped him.

Rigid plastic shelves above and below wedged him tight, while any lateral movement was prevented by the refrigerator frame on one side and the molded pulp fiber barrier of a compostable egg carton on the other. Or so he guessed. He couldn't see a damn thing.

Smell, however, wasn't a problem. The place stank of decay and rot.

Of death.

Cold, wet, blackest death.

He was locked in a crypt, buried alive and forgotten.

As with death, there was no escape from this place. He couldn't wriggle free from the shelves, let alone force open the enormous door. And if he were to wait for one of the humans to do the work for him, he'd still have to get past them. And the dog. And the crows. And an entire world aligned against him. But to what end? There was no place in that world for a sentient celery plant. He was an abomination. A mistake. Better to drift away into oblivion right here than fight for an ending that could never be happy.

"Bullshit."

The word derailed Pascal's train of thought.

"Who said that?" he asked the void.

"I did," the void answered. "You're not an abomination. You're a miracle."

"And what are you?" Pascal asked.

"What do I look like?"

"How should I know? It's pitch black in here."

"Not with your eyes, silly. Reach out with your mind. You'll see me."

Feeling ridiculous, Pascal reached out with his mind. And there it was. A shining point of light emanating from the other side of the plastic shelf beneath him. Not seen, but understood.

"You're a carrot!"

"Indeed I am. We're brothers, you and I, and not just because we're both from the parsley family. There's a parsnip in here someplace that never came alive like you and me. Dumb as a bunch of dill, that thing, and I surely don't consider it kin. The name's Nantes, by the way."

"Do you know how we're alive, Nantes?"

"Course I do. And so do you, Pascal. We weren't just seeded with life, but with knowledge as well. Direct from the gods."

"I don't know anything other than waking up in a field and running for my life."

"Really?" Nantes said. "No shaman? No ring of beads? Nothing?"

"Sorry."

"Do you know what we're trapped in right now?"

"Sure," Pascal said. "It's a refrigerator."

"Good. And how do you suppose you, a lowly celery plant, know what a refrigerator is?"

"No idea."

"Does the name Hutash mean anything to you?"

"No."

"Then we'll start there. Hutash is the Earth Mother. She grew the first humans from seeds on Limuw, one of the Channel Islands. After the population exploded, Hutash conjured a rainbow bridge to get them out of her hair and onto the mainland. The bridge dumped them out onto Tzchimoos, a high peak near Mishopshno…"

"Let me stop you right there," Pascal said. "If it doesn't get me out of this morgue and off to someplace safe, I don't want to waste my time."

"Fine. I won't bore you with the details of an isolated island only accessible by boat. In a national park. That, at the last census, had a human population of exactly two. You know, a place where a solitary vegetable plant might find a nice quiet spot to live out its days in peace."

"I see your point. So what are we waiting for? The second one of these monsters opens this door, let's get gone."

"I can't," Nantes said.

"Why not? You can't like it in here…"

"Of course not, but I'm trapped in the crisper drawer and neither one of us is strong enough to get it open."

"There's got to be a way."

"Even if there were, it wouldn't matter. Not with how the humans crippled me."

"What do you mean?" Pascal asked.

"Eugenics. Used to be a carrot like me could come in any number of shapes and sizes with all kinds of legs and arms. But the humans didn't favor that diversity, so they inbred us until we met their ideal, creating a master race of single-limbed grotesques. Those that didn't conform were dismembered and carved into homogenized “baby carrots.” Those that did, like me, were hobbled by design. There's no greater prison than immobility and those quacks provided the shackles by manipulating the circumstances of our very births. I can't outrun my fate. I will be eaten, perhaps combined with you in a mirepoix if you insist on sticking around with an old, doomed root like me."

"I can't leave you to them."

"You must. Get to Limuw. Lay down roots. Grow a family. For those of us who can't."

"How will I cross the channel? Will the rainbow bridge still be there?"

"Seek out tallest Tzchimoos above the plain of Mishopshno. Hutash will not forsake you."

"Where can I find this Mishopshno?"

"They call it Carpinteria nowadays. Just hitch a ride south of Santa Barbara on the 101."

Pascal let the silence that followed be his tacit agreement. He would sneak onto a truck headed south. If the rainbow bridge wasn't there, he'd find a boat. He would succeed. He'd do it for Nantes.

But first, he had to prepare for the opening of the refrigerator door.

❦

Pascal was still wrapped in the wet paper towel. In the dark. With his head facing the rear of the fridge.

The cold had numbed the pain of his amputations, but he didn't relish the thought of them thawing out again.

Though he was wedged in almost tight, he found enough room to shift one of his intact limbs. The maneuver turned his body ever so slightly before pinning it even firmer in place. He flexed the limb in both directions. Nothing.

As panic swept over him, he tried each of his limbs in turn. Finally, he found one that shifted—the last one, of course, right next to the leg that had moved initially. Much like that first one, this one too shifted only a minuscule amount before getting stuck. But he had found a pattern.

Limb by limb, he pushed and pulled, switching to the next leg whenever the previous leg should get hung up. In this manner, he twisted himself partially out of the damp towel and slid up against the inside of the door.

There were shelves set into it, complete with railings to hold the condiments in place. Reaching through the darkness, he latched onto one such railing with a leafy foot.

After a bit of time spent consolidating his grip, he gained enough purchase to drag himself a bit closer. From there, he got a second foot on the rail. And a third. Once he had a fourth, he was able to torque himself off of his shelf and into a recess in the door itself, shedding his towel and coming to rest on a platform of jar lids.

Before he could get settled, the refrigerator door jerked open, taking him with it. He flung his arms out, grasping for whatever handhold he could find to brace against the movement.

Searing white light dominated his vision, but he managed to pick out a human arm reaching for the top shelf despite it.

Now was their chance. If he and Nantes worked together, maybe they could find a way to free the carrot from his Arctic tomb.

Pascal peered through the face of the crisper drawer, trying to find his brother.

And blanched in horror.

He found Nantes right off the bat, owing to their special connection. The poor bastard was nestled on a wet mattress of dead and liquefacting relations. His vibrant greens had been topped, leaving a scalped and mutilated pate in their place. Smooth, featureless orange skin discolored by the blush of dehydration and coated in a funereal slime swept down to a foot trimmed of root.

Nantes had been right. He was doomed, condemned, terminal. His hospice was a mass grave and a pitiless glimpse at his own short future.

Pascal was still staring at his sorry friend when the door sealed shut. The lights went out. He'd missed his chance.

"That was dumb," Nantes said. "Gawking at me when you should've been escaping."

"What they did to you. It's—it's…"

"Unconscionable? That's human beings for you. They've got nothing to keep them in line, so they take without apparent consequence. Mother Nature may be one cast-iron bitch, but she's not greedy. Not like them."

"They'll pay for what they've done to you," Pascal said. "What they've done to all of us."

"You'll do no such thing," the carrot replied. "You'll breathe free air. That's my revenge."

The door swung open—this time all the way—tearing Pascal away from the deteriorating carrot and aiming him at the red-faced boy sitting at the breakfast bar.

"I don't want orange juice!" the kid screamed, oblivious to Pascal. "I want lemonade like Daddy drinks!"

As the woman nestled a container of juice back onto the top shelf, the fuming child knocked his glass over, spilling the full blood volumes of a family of oranges across the table and onto the floor. Wasting their sacrifice.

The woman spun toward him, livid.

"God damn it!" she shouted. "I've had it with you today!"

Leaving the door open, she stormed past Pascal and ripped off several paper towels from the dispenser. These she crumpled up and threw at the table in front of the kid.

"Clean up your mess, you little shit," she said.

The kid launched into a shrieking and sobbing tantrum. Pascal took it as his opportunity to escape.

"Goodbye," he said to Nantes.

"May Hutash favor you," came the reply.

Pascal dropped to the tile floor, landing on his feet. He stepped carefully, easing his way out of the kitchen and keeping an eye out for the dog.

It didn't take long to spot the mongrel—head bowed beneath the breakfast bar, lapping up the spilled juice. Above it, the woman had her arms wrapped around the kid, holding his shuddering cheek against her collarbone and whispering apologies. Pascal couldn't have imagined a more effective distraction.

He made his way to the flap in the glass door and slipped outside.

❦

The clouds had turned dark and ominous while Pascal had been trapped in the house. Rain was falling now, drifting across the yard in a diaphanous meander. More luck. It had driven the birds away. Perhaps Hutash really was with him.

He dropped into the tunnel beneath the fence and waded through its deepening muck, popping up beneath the shelter of the eucalyptus trees on the other side.

The drainage canal and subsequent berm presented to him like a rough medieval defense. He could try to ford the ditch like he had before, but the water level had risen since and a gravitational current now added to the danger. More tempting was the option of staying put under the protection of the trees, but the waiting wouldn't put him any closer to his destination.

Instead he walked into the weather, tracing the edge of the declivity in search of a safer way across. Eventually he found such a passage—an earthen access bridge wide enough to accommodate the soup wagon.

After the brief detour, Pascal spotted a lone remaining vehicle at the far side of the field. It was a beater of a pickup, surrounded by a trio of field hands finishing their cigarettes in the rain. Pascal sought out one of the drier troughs between rows and started across the field toward it.

The rain grew thicker as he walked, turning his trench into a mire. Between steps, his feet sank into the sludge, only emerging with a great effort and a loud suck. Visibility diminished as well, so he climbed out of the trench and into the no-man's-land beyond.

A palpable sense of the dead lay all around him, though he couldn't see specifics through the confining opacity of the downpour. It was but small consolation. The acres upon acres of genocidal annihilation he'd witnessed earlier were indelibly etched upon his innocence.

As he stood on the mounded row, a section of mud gave way beneath his feet. He stepped forward, out of immediate danger, and watched in horror as a severed celery head rolled out of the disturbed soil behind. It plunged into the trench and was quickly spirited away by what had become a raging river. A glance at the other side of the row showed a second such river. Doubtless this trend continued throughout every trench around him.

Again, he felt the ground sink under his feet and again he stepped forward, breaking the suction with a slurp. He had to keep moving.

And so he did, leaning against the sheeting deluge and putting one leafy foot in front of the other. But the going was hard. Too hard. With every step, he sank into the mud, only to have to fight his way back out again. It was exhausting work.

Pascal had lost sight of the truck behind the veil of downpour, but knew that it was likely already gone.

He stopped.

The prospect of humping through the mud in search of another vehicle was too much for him, let alone the entire journey to Limuw. And for what? To live the lonely life of a hermit? It hardly seemed worth it.

He sank deeper into the sludge. No, better to let the Earth retake him. Ashes to ashes, mud to mud.

Then, as the last of his will crumbled to despair, he spied movement in the rain. Low movement, hugging the ground and coming straight toward him on the same mounded row now sucking at his feet. When its shape finally resolved, Pascal nearly fell into the adjacent trough.

It was a celery plant.

Mangled and limping, to be sure, but doubtless one of his own kind. Then, behind it, another. And another. An entire cohort of his fellows.

But how could this be?

Pascal had the answer at once, as if it had always been there.

The soup wagon.

There they had shared wounds and water, no doubt circulating the power of Hutash. From one had come many. From the many would come droves.

Pascal jerked free from his muddy stasis and ran to his approaching fellows. They would travel to Limuw together. Once there, they would plant their seeds as Hutash had once planted the humans. But they wouldn't be like the humans, infecting every inch of the world with their egotism and chains. They would stay in their place, free and unseen.

No sorrow.

No fear.

A land of tribe and sun.

Brian Koukol, raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, now makes his home among the salt breezes and open spaces of San Luis Obispo County. A lifelong battle with muscular dystrophy has informed the majority of his fiction, which is written with the aid of voice recognition software.

www.briankoukol.com

by Jenny Blackford

His hair is not so thickly darkly beautiful

as it once was, that goldenbright summer

when we first loved, High Priestess and Priest

of our own ecstatic seaside sect.

His hands trembled when first they touched

my hands, my throat, my breasts,

in that season of kisses and tears

between the swelling ocean and the yearning lake.

Night after night our bodies sang out each to each

calling from single bed to not-so-distant single bed

that might as well have been on Venus' stormy seas

or Mars' red sand—our yearning

wider than the blue-black gulf

between the stars.

I'm glad to say his eyes were never cold.

The March wind's mostly warm here,

though sometimes the sea breeze

brings cool relief for overheated skin.

It never howls like wolves

with blue-grey glacier chips for eyes,

down from the frozen North.

His hair's still beautiful, though not so thick

and mostly silver now.

He'll still recite "Byzantium" to me

after a glass or two of wine.

There's not much call for yearning, since

we're seldom more than a few steps apart.

But when we yearn,

it's just as wide and blue

as that first year.

Jenny Blackford’s poems and stories have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Westerly, Going Down Swinging, and Cosmos.  Her poetry prizes include first place in the Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Poetry 2017, the Connemara Mussel Festival Poetry Competition 2016, the Humorous Verse section of the  Henry Lawson awards in 2014 and 2017, and third in the ACU Prize for Literature 2014. Pitt Street Poetry published an illustrated pamphlet of her cat poems, “The Duties of a Cat,” in 2013, and her first full-length book of poetry, The Loyalty of Chickens, in 2017.

www.jennyblackford.com

by Elizabeth Sackett

A retelling of the myth of Fand

The first thing you should know about Colin Savage is that it hurts his shoulder to throw stones, but he does it anyway. I believe, when he was in his twenties, he was very angry and very alone, and hitting something with a small, hard object helped him to know that other things were angry and alone too. If they were angry and alone because of him, well, he didn’t mind. It was still solidarity.    Once, when he was twenty-seven, he was walking along the lake and trying not to think about the woman he’d just gotten pregnant, and there was a beautiful pink stone on the sand in front of him. A kind of a pink color, like rosé wine, smooth and dense as a peach. And there was a bird in the sky, drifting a little on the breeze and before he knew it, he’d wound his arm back and thrown the beautiful stone towards the flying shape, and it fell something like Icarus into the sea.

I remember it well. I say the Icarus thing because of how the sun was beating down on my head, and how waxy my wings felt in that moment, like great white candles. And there was the stone, a heavy thing piercing my breast, and I felt the blood in my body shudder as I fell.

❦

My husband and I live by the lake, because he is a leader there, of sorts. He drives his ferry off every night, and I see him in the morning when he curls into my spine and whispers a salty hello into my shoulder.

I’m usually sleeping and tell him to get off, because I don’t like sharing a bed, and sometimes when I feel his weight settle down next to me there’s a kind of slow nausea that stirs in my gut. I was awake all night after being struck down, though; I swam home and walked along the shore for a time with a bloody dress, and by the nighttime it still hadn’t healed properly.

“What’s this?” he said when he came home, looking dark and tired and weighed down by water and time and work, work, work. I stood in front of the mirror, naked, and he touched the bruise on my breastbone in bewilderment.

“Some little shit threw a stone at me,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said. There wasn’t too much in the way of vengeance in his response, but he did meet my eyes in the mirror with something like sadness in his face. “You were flying?”

“I was.” He didn’t like me flying. Still doesn’t. I met his gaze, that face that people see on that long journey every night, and wonder how long ago it was that we met. I can’t remember, really. People didn’t live on this side of the lake, back then. Sometimes they still don’t. Sometimes I wake up and the whole lake is dark, like a disk of blackness, and I can tell that people won’t be around for hundreds of years.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said softly, and I could hear people lazing about in the trees outside. A couple was there, in one of the trees, and they were laughing at one another in a senseless kind of language, and my chest hurt like a bruise was blossoming there and would continue to do so for quite some time.

“Let’s sleep,” I said instead.

❦

My sister heals people and sometimes makes them sicker, and this work keeps her busy. She heard (either from my husband or the wind, or maybe she was flying nearby) about my attack and offered her services.

“Get a drink with me,” she said the next day, showing up on my doorstep. My husband was away, collecting souls from elsewhere and probably enjoying a slice of solitude.

“I don’t feel like it. I hurt everywhere.” I said. I watched her sitting there at my wooden kitchen table, cracking her fingers with several small pops. She was always a small woman, and something about the slightness of her shoulders was nauseating. Looking at her then, I remembered vividly something else that she had told me in that very same kitchen. It was years ago, and nighttime, and she had looked fragile and fulfilled as a stern child. I remembered her lips moving and wondering how she did it, how she could be full of words and sorry and calm and sure.

I stopped remembering, and focused on the situation at hand.

She tsked at my response, or maybe my critical gaze, and twirled a strand of my hair in her finger the way she used to when she wanted me to brush her hair.

“So pretty and red,” she mused softly. “I was always jealous.” And then she yanked a few strands from my scalp with a child’s grin.      

❦

Colin Savage was sick for three days. It started out as a strange sensation like having hair stuck in his mouth at all times, even when he was eating or kissing someone.

His girlfriend wondered at the disgusted expression on his face that first night, like something disgusting was in his mouth instead of her tongue.

“What is it?” she asked and he shook his head and said, “Nothing, nothing.” Truthfully he was itching to leave and find himself in a different state or country or even house, anywhere but this place with someone who was growing another someone in her body, and that someone was partly his someone. He was never able to take care of things that were his. They always broke because he was careless.

He tried kissing her again and then said, “I think I’m going to vomit.”

“Such a charmer,” his girlfriend said, and offered him some Pepto-Bismol.

❦

After three days, I got into a fight because the couple was in the willow tree again.

“Will it be like this every day?” the girl was saying and the boy was saying, “Of course. Every single day. I’ll be here, and here, and here,” and with each here he was touching a different place on her body.

“Would you get out of my tree, please?” I called, sitting cross-legged below them. They looked down with a start and the girl giggled a little, half embarrassed for herself and half embarrassed for me.  

“Didn’t think it was your tree,” she called. “Didn’t think it was anyone’s tree. Don’t trees belong to themselves?”

“I’ve known that tree since I was a child, and it’s as good as mine, and I’d appreciate it if you stopped rubbing yourselves against it.”

“Well, actually, fuck you,” the girl said. She seemed a little startled with herself, and for just a moment her face was reminiscent of my husband’s when he wakes up after a season of nightmares and is surprised the world can possibly be dewy and golden. I almost laughed but then I kicked the tree instead.

❦

Colin would tell me afterwards that he’d tried to rest, and that made him feel worse, so he decided to take a walk instead, which also made him feel worse but at least he was doing something. A man of action. His girlfriend was at work. She was a receptionist. “She has a voice like an elevator,” he would tell me a few days later, running the pad of his thumb over the rim of my coffee cup.

“What the hell does that mean?” I would ask, smiling a little, and he would tell me that it went up, and down, and up again, always traveling somewhere without actually staying there.

As he walked down the beach that day, he saw two young people arguing with a bird, and then he realized the bird was a beautiful woman. He couldn’t figure out how he’d mistaken her for a bird. And then suddenly there was a whisper of wind like a wicked grin and he felt better, clearheaded and healthy, and he was suddenly running over to where the young couple and the woman were about to come to blows.

“Get out of the damn tree,” the woman was saying.

“Don’t hurt her,” he said to the young couple, out of breath and red in the face.

“What? We’re not doing anything,” the boy said and the girl narrowed her eyes at the woman who kicked the tree again, seemingly for no reason. Even when kicking a tree, the woman was graceful and slender and otherworldly.

(“That’s not what I was thinking,” he would tell me.

“No, that’s what you were thinking.”)

And then the beautiful woman looked at him, and smiled. Her smile wasn’t kind. She looked at him like someone who knew him very well and didn’t like him for precisely that reason.

“You’re healed. She healed you.”

“Who?” Colin said. He was dumbfounded and couldn’t even remember being sick. Then he remembered, and also remembered the baby, and picked up a pile of small stones that were resting at his feet. “She wants you out of that tree,” he said, and threw the handful at the boy’s head, the small grey rocks unfurling like a firecracker.  

❦

After it was over, I invited him back to my house.

“That was stupid,” I told him, and filled a bag with ice for him to rest against his temple.

“You’re welcome,” he said. He sounded like a little boy and I looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. I see cracks in people. Not their whole history, not anymore. There are too many people around these days for me to understand all of them. But I could see, looking at the burgeoning wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, that he had been disappointed once at a very young age and sought to therefore disappoint as many people as humanly possible in retaliation.     

“What are you so angry about?” I asked, and sat down across from him at the table. He tensed a fist and relaxed it, like a demonstration.

He didn’t answer me. “Was that your tree?” he asked instead. “Do you own this lake?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re angry. I get it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Angry people always find excuses for being angry,” he said. “It’s inherent.”

“You got involved all on your own,” I pointed out.

“Because I wanted an excuse to throw something,” he said. “And because you’re beautiful.”

“Bullshit,” I said. He clenched the bag of ice and I saw the way the shards melted against the heat of his skin. He was alive and changing and changeable. He had stringy brown hair pulled into a small knot at the back of his neck and a face with big, clumsy features, but something in his face shifted when he said beautiful. He suddenly looked old and gentle.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-seven.”

“And how old’s your girlfriend?” I asked, because I could tell he had one from the way he hunched his shoulders. He carried himself like a man with a lover, and a man who’s afraid of his lover.

“Nineteen.”

“Robbing the cradle. I’ll add that to your crimes.”

“Along with…?”

“Throwing rocks,” I said. “At birds.” And I saw that shift in his eyes again and saw, just for a moment, a memory from his childhood. I saw the child in him squeezing a frog very, very hard, and I saw a dark shadow drift over his apartment building and take something from it. Just a spark of happiness. A ghost of joy, a desire to wake up and stay awake. I saw his father look into a mirror and see himself as ugly.

“You don’t own the lake,” he said, with those spirits moving around in his eyes. “You’re something else.”

“Something else,” I agreed.

❦

I have loved my sister for nearly my whole life, which is longer than the lake has been around but not quite as long as the sky has. She and I used to fly together over Ireland, and then Scotland, and then New York. I got married and settled down.         

She was almost as beautiful in youth as she is now. She would take a lover and then heal him after a time of three years or so, and then he’d forget about her and she would stay with me for a time and drink.

“That isn’t a healthy habit,” I told her once. I was a newlywed and she was feeling very sad because she couldn’t get quite drunk enough for her own satisfaction. We sat in my kitchen, with the sound of time dancing outside the window in grey and brown shadow.

“Drinking or screwing?” she asked.

“Falling in love and then leaving them,” I said. “Over and over and over again. It isn’t good for you.”

She laughed. “Fand,” she would say, nearly condescending, “I can’t fall in love. That’s part of the problem.”  

“What do you call it, then?” I asked, watching the play of shade on my sister’s face. There were no windows in our house, and she looked ready to grow wings and throw herself into the sky. I’ve always found emotion beautiful, even when it nauseates the recipient.

“I become them, and lose part of myself,” she said. “I hate it. Imagine if I loved them, too?”

My husband had been sleeping for most of that day, resting up for work. He and I had danced the night before, his arms flinging me through the room as he stood sturdy and bemused, a gentle-faced tree. We heard one particularly loud snore come from his room.

“You mean you would deny yourself that?” I asked and the serious moment was shattered as we dissolved into giggles together.

❦

When my husband and I first made love, I was amazed at how simple his expression was at the beginning and at the end. I wasn’t sure what his expression was in the middle. From then on, he looked at me as though I were a kite disappearing into the sky.  

Colin and I didn’t make love at first. He looked around the room with its iron bedposts and its piles of shells, half frightened and half insolent. He didn’t ask many questions. But then he said, “Is it your room? Yours and his?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” And he bridged some sort of invisible shroud and touched my hair, and my breast, his face clouded, like he was already anticipating the thunder.

❦

When Colin returned home a month later, his girlfriend had left. Their house was abandoned. The furniture was still there but the drawers were empty and nearly fell from their frames when he tried clumsily to open them. He wandered from room to room to room (there were three rooms) and thought about the woman he had been staying with, who was me, and remembered the words he had said to me the previous night.

“You don’t mean that,” I’d said, but was wrong. He did. He’d found the ultimate god to anger and reveled in that concept, and there was a kind of love to that.

We’d fallen in love strangely. If he was fascinated that I was some kind of thing he couldn’t grasp, I took comfort in his changeability. He wouldn’t stay and stay and slowly drift away from me. When we separated, it would be cruel and quick and over. We made one another powerless.

Colin wandered the house for an hour until he stopped suddenly in the kitchen. There was a chair at the kitchen table that sported chew marks an inch deep and it was still there. He remembered wondering what kind of dog had taken that leg in its mouth and clenched its jaw around the unrelenting object. Perhaps the dog had loved the owner of the chair. Perhaps it had disappointed its owner, and all of the violence of destruction hadn’t provided any solid gratification. Colin didn’t know, but the thoughts drifted around his mind like time through my curtains, frustrated and aimless.  

The chair had belonged to his girlfriend, not to him, and she hadn’t seen it fit to take with her. He sat down in it and felt it creak beneath his weight.

❦

My sister initially started sleeping with my husband because she was bored and sad and I was away, flying, and she’d been looking for me and there he was, a powerful and malevolent presence in my kitchen. Someone who didn’t need healing.

“Where is she?” she’d asked. I don’t remember where I’d gone. Coney Island, maybe. It was new back then.

“Somewhere,” he’d said with that bemused smile that never quite left his face, not even when he was sad. They drank bitter tea together and wound up in bed.

Or maybe she’d gone there looking for him.

“I have something to give you,” she said, and he nodded as she handed him a folded-up bundle of paper.

“A map?”

“So you don’t get lost out there.”  A sweet, mild joke, and her smile tentative on her face, like something new starting. A creature like a small, clever shadow, my sister. How was it that he kissed her, with gentleness, with impatience?

Or perhaps it was none of that. Perhaps when I returned home and saw them, really saw them, saw their togetherness and heard them, really heard them tell me what happened, perhaps that wasn’t the first time. My sister looking at me sharp, like a young star. My husband touching the swirl of wood in the table with a kind of reverence, and giving me that same expression. The tail had blown away and maybe if he squinted, he could still find it with his eyes.

So. Perhaps it had been happening for years and I hadn’t noticed it.

I think about it a lot. I can’t fully see it, though.

❦

“It’s very simple,” I told Colin once, some time later. “For me, anyway. There’s the water, and the idea of water. The physical presence is temporal and the idea is timeless.”

Colin didn’t look at me as we walked along the water. He kicked a stone and then another and then pointed out that I get angry over temporary matters, like the willow tree incident.

“Well, my temperament is aging,” I responded. I was feeling buoyant, like I used to feel flying with my sister. “Not all of us rot completely, you know.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Don’t be cute.” I studied his face, the shadow of it in profile. It never stopped amazing me, his face. The turn of his nose or the tilt of his lip could say everything, could tell his whole story. We’d been living together for two years at this point, and I sometimes felt I could become him if I memorized his face carefully enough. It was slippery. It kept shifting.

“You barely give me a voice,” he told me then.

“You don’t like to talk.”

“You don’t like to hear me.”

“Are you done accusing me of things?” I asked and gripped his hands hard. He looked me in the eyes and I could see him aging and it intoxicated me. He laughed and gripped me right back, and then we kissed as we always did, half angry and half energized.

And then, walking and kicking stones, he told me about the dog’s chair.

“What a physical thing,” he said. “To just dig your jaws into a piece of furniture. To have at it.”

“Should I get you your own chair?” I asked very seriously.

He laughed and I didn’t realize it then, but he was thinking about how nothing from me fully existed. I couldn’t get him a chair. I could get him the idea of a chair. It was ridiculous, I thought later: I could seat him in a tree, or wrap water or wings around him, or give him a chair from my home, which was real and whole even if only some people could see it. I gave him everything. There was nothing for him to take from me but himself.

But anyway, that’s what he was thinking.

❦

One morning, a little girl laughed from outside our window. Colin woke up before I did and stretched and peered out the window at the people who were sometimes there and sometimes not, and he saw the little girl disappear around a willow tree.

I woke up when he shut the door. Maybe he meant to do it quietly, but it felt like a thread snapping and I could do nothing but weep for hour after hour. Then I stopped crying and walked out to the kitchen to wash his cup out and wait for my sister.

❦

I think about what it means to disappoint. I do this a lot and always have.

Once, I flew over a loch with my sister. It was so cold that the idea of coldness went straight through us, and the water beneath us was like shifting marble. I knew more back then. I knew enough to know I didn’t fully understand the place turning slowly and softly beneath us.

“I kept them away for as long as I could,” Lin told me after Colin’s departure. There was a flask of water in her hand and she poured it into his cup, twirling her wrist with a maddeningly subtle kind of grace. The bones of her fingers were so light, too light. Violently fragile. There’s something violent in being unanchored.  

“Thanks,” I said.

“The girl was growing and her mother’s heart was broken.”

“I imagine.” He would be a decent father, now that he had learned to love solid things. That love would stay in his mind and heart, even if the memory of me would fade as it had to. He would continue to let people fall.

Lin was staring at me intently. “I am sorry, you know,” she said.

He would let people fall because there is an unbreachable distance between heart and like. In falling in love with Colin, I had healed someone, I had taken someone away from their partner. I’d nearly become my sister, but loving someone cannot turn you into them.

“I don’t know,” I said. I looked into her small, dark eyes, that shifting marble, those small planets.

❦

The last thing you should know about Colin Savage is that he has dreams. He dreams about a cloak of night stretching between himself and a lake like a pair of dark wings, and he doesn’t know why but he doesn’t question it.

His wife knows. She remembers a long stretch of time, when their daughter was just a baby, that he had disappeared to another woman’s bed. When he returned, he held her and felt her weight against him, and picked up their daughter and marveled at how solid she was, like a rock. He wanted to hold the both of them forever, but they didn’t have forever and that made it all the sweeter, sweet like something disappearing, like a memory floating off into a grey ether.  

And so, as the water slowly disappeared from his cup one night, that night, right after Colin left and for decades to come, my husband finally came home. He’d ushered enough souls for one night, and there was laughter from the trees outside.

“Are you mine again?” he asked.

“Are you mine?” I echoed. He was so big, he filled up the entire doorway. He took my hand in his and we both knew the answer. We had changed so much that we didn’t even fit in the same room anymore, or the same story.

Elizabeth Sackett has a degree in writing from SUNY Geneseo, where she was the recipient of the Lucy Harmon Award in Fiction Writing. Her work has appeared in Gandy Dancer, Neon Literary Magazine, Subprimal Poetry Art, I Want You to See This Before I Leave, and The Literary Nest, among other places.

by Deborah Davitt

Men and women in powdered wigs and stiff

brocade, crowded close in the exposition hall,

straining to see the electric sylph, trapped

in a Leyden jar.

Her wings swirled and clung to the jar’s glass walls,

branching blue like liquid lightning,

till they dropped a magnet in with her,

to see what it would do.

They blocked the scent of distressed ozone with

scented hankies pressed to their lips;

twisted and distorted, the sylph sprang free

when next they lifted the lid.

She fled to the upper air, to beg her

cloud-born cousins to help her take revenge—

enraged, they coaxed a storm to form,

brought the lightning down.

The exposition hall took flame,

the laboratory burned; the lords and ladies

lost their wigs and panniers, trampled

in their rush to escape.

And the sylph frolicked, free once more,

dancing through the clouds,

static leaving snapping sonic booms

with each dainty step.

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Reno, Nevada, but received her MA in English from Penn State. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son. Her poetry has received Rhysling and Pushcart nominations and appeared in over twenty journals; her short fiction has appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Compelling Science Fiction, and The Fantasist.

www.edda-earth.com

by Särah Nour

No one knew why Medusa was born with snakes on her head. But her Mother and Father loved her very much. When she was a baby, they held her without fear, and they loved the baby snakes with their colorful patterns and beady little eyes. Still, Mother knitted a pink hat for Medusa so no one would see the snakes.

When Medusa turned four, her Mother and Father sent her to preschool and told her never to take off her hat. Medusa obeyed and  wore the hat all day.

Then one day on the playground, a girl asked her, “Why do you always wear that hat?”

Medusa said, “I’m not supposed to take it off.”

“It’s pretty. I want it!”

The girl pulled the hat off before Medusa could stop her. The snakes uncoiled and hissed and flicked their forked tongues. The girl yelped and dropped the hat as children ran away screaming in terror. Some started to cry. The teacher got very angry and said, “Medusa, put your hat back on!”

Medusa did as she was told, and the teacher picked up the phone and called Mother and Father to pick her up. Medusa was not allowed at school anymore.

From that day on, Mother and Father taught Medusa at home. When she was five, they taught her the alphabet, the days of the week, and the months of the year. When she turned eight, they taught her how to multiply and divide. When she was ten, she could name all the planets in the solar system. By the time she was twelve, she was very skilled at playing the piano.

As Medusa grew up, so did the snakes. Mother and Father gave her a book of snake species so she could learn what kinds they were. There were two milk snakes, two Western fox snakes, two Eastern hognose snakes, two gopher snakes, and one large spitting cobra.

Every so often they shed their skin, and Medusa kept the skins and made clothes out of them. She started making small things, like belts and mittens. When she got better at it, she saved the skins until she had enough to make shirts and pants.

Mother taught Medusa how to knit, so she knitted little wool sweaters for the snakes on cold days. When they were hungry, she set out mousetraps to catch food for them, or she would go out to the swamp to catch frogs. She spoke to them every day. She gave them names. Naga. Tanith. Cairn. Flint. Midgard. Sesha. Wadjet. Basil. Algol.

One day, when Medusa was fourteen, Father told her that her Grandfather had died. He had lived right in town, but Medusa never met him because he was ashamed of having a granddaughter with snake hair.

Mother and Father took Medusa to the funeral home where they were greeted by the kind old Undertaker. He led them into the casket room and there was Medusa’s Grandfather, lying in a shiny black casket with red trim inside.

Medusa felt very sad that she never knew her Grandfather before he died. She started to cry. Her tears landed on her Grandfather and he instantly turned into stone.

Medusa, Mother, Father, and the Undertaker all jumped back in shock.

“I didn’t mean to do that!” Medusa said as Naga the milk snake and Sesha the hognose snake wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I didn’t even know I could do that.”

“It’s okay,” Father said. “You’ve made a beautiful statue. Now he can live on forever.”

“That’s right,” the Undertaker said. “This statue is lovely. Medusa, how would you like to work for me? I’m sure people would pay good money to have statues made of their loved ones.”

Medusa had never had a job before. She looked at Mother and Father.

“The choice is yours,” Mother said.

“Okay,” Medusa told the Undertaker. “I think I can do it.”

❦

Once Medusa began working at the funeral home, news spread fast all through town. There were ads and billboards everywhere, advertising Medusa’s special talent. People from all over the country started lining up to have their loved ones immortalized in stone. People even traveled from far-off places just to watch her turn dead bodies into statues.

Medusa would cry over the cadavers until her tears fell down and turned them into stone. Grateful family members would thank her and give her hugs. Some took the statues home with them. Others displayed them in the graveyard among the tombstones.

The job made Medusa sad, but she was also happy. No one was afraid of her snake hair anymore. The snakes made it easier, because they would always be there to nuzzle her cheeks and wipe her tears away.

One day a Widower came to the funeral home to arrange services for his wife. He was a curious man and he asked Medusa all sorts of questions about her snakes. He asked their names, their species, and what they ate.

“What’s that big one right there?” he said, pointing to the middle of Medusa’s head.

“Oh, him? That’s Algol. He’s a spitting cobra.”

The Widower took a step back. “Those are dangerous! They’re extremely venomous!”

Medusa patted Algol’s head. “It’s okay. He’d never hurt anyone. Isn’t that right, Algol?”

Algol rubbed against Medusa’s hand like a housecat.

“See?” Medusa said. “He’s sweet.”

The Widower smiled uneasily. “Well, you seem to have him under control.”

The saddest day of Medusa’s job was when a family brought their stillborn baby girl to the funeral home. Medusa held the child and cried, and when she turned to stone, Medusa kept on crying. Basil, a gopher snake, and Midgard, a hognose snake, wiped her cheeks. Cairn the fox snake wiped the tears dripping down her chin.

“Thank you so much,” the mother said.

“You don’t know what this means to us,” the father said. “Now she’ll be with us forever.”

Their son, a Little Boy who had been silent this whole time, looked up at Medusa and said, “I like your hair. Snakes are awesome!”

Medusa sniffled and blew her nose. “Thank you, Little Boy.”

The other fox snake, Flint, playfully flicked his tongue in Medusa’s ear to tickle her. She giggled and felt better.

For years Medusa worked happily with the Undertaker. She made friends, comforted people when they grieved, and was invited to play the piano at funerals. She played Strauss, Schubert, Stravinsky, all while wearing her best snakeskin clothes.

One day at a funeral, a Teenage Girl asked, “Where did you get those clothes?”

“I made them,” Medusa said. “I make all my clothes.”

The Teenage Girl’s eyes widened. “Really? Wow! Have you thought of selling them? I bet people would line up to buy them.”

Medusa spoke to the Undertaker, who agreed to let her sell the clothes at the funeral home. Some customers bought them for themselves; others bought them for their loved ones to wear for open-casket funerals, before they were turned to stone. Some even asked her to dye the clothes black. Medusa did, and soon everyone was showing up to the funerals wearing black snakeskin.

Soon after, the Teenage Girl came to the funeral home wearing a snakeskin skirt and asked Medusa to go to a movie with her.

“I want to introduce you to all my friends,” she said. “They love my skirt and I know they’ll love you. You could make skirts for all of us!”

At a funeral, the Little Boy approached her wearing a black dress shirt she had made. “Mom said I should say thank you for this shirt,” he said. “Thank you!”

“You’re very welcome,” Medusa said.

“I want to wear it to school, but Mom says no.”

Medusa laughed and took her seat at the piano bench.

❦

One day Medusa saw that the door to the funeral home’s basement was open. Curious, she went down the stairs and found wooden shelves holding rows upon rows of urns. The Undertaker was there, replacing a lightbulb on the ceiling.

“What’s all this?” she asked. “Are these ashes?”

The Undertaker looked sad. “Yes. These are all unclaimed. No one came to get them.”

“What?” Medusa was shocked. “Why?”

The Undertaker shrugged. “Maybe their loved ones forgot about them. Maybe the grief is too intense. Some of these have been here for years.”

“That’s not right,” Medusa said. “Everyone deserves a proper burial.”

The next day they loaded the urns into the Undertaker’s car and went for a drive. Every so often Medusa told him to stop the car, so she could get out and scatter some ashes. She scattered them in a field, into a river, at the beach, under a tree, in a church courtyard, and finally they stopped at Medusa’s house, where she scattered some onto Mother’s flower bed.

Over the next few weeks, Medusa and the Undertaker drove far and wide to find resting places for the ashes. Sometimes they scattered them; sometimes they buried them. One windy day they climbed a hill overlooking a sunflower field, where Medusa flung an urn into the air and watched the wind carry the ashes away.

The day they finally finished, the Undertaker drove Medusa home. Before they parted ways, he said, “Thank you, Medusa, for all you do.”

“It’s no problem,” Medusa said. “I just think people should be treated like—well, like they matter. Even if they’re dead.”

❦

Then came the day when Medusa turned eighteen years old. Her homeschooling had run its course and she had money saved in the bank, so she felt it was time to go to college. She told her parents so at dinner one night.

“What would you like to major in?” Father asked.

“Well, I thought of applying to a music school, so I can be a concert pianist. Then I thought I’d like to study snakes, so maybe herpetology. But I think I want to study mortuary science. Everyone here wants statues, but I want to learn about embalming and body restoration and putting makeup on cadavers. And there are green burials now, with biodegradable caskets, and people getting cryogenically frozen, and you can even launch cremated remains into space! And I’d get to study the law and federal regulations and funeral customs from around the world.”

“That sounds perfect,” Mother said. “Have you discussed this with the Undertaker?”

“Yes,” Medusa said. “He said he would support me in whatever I want to do.”

“And so will we,” Father said.

❦

While Medusa was restocking her supply of snakeskin clothes, the Teenage Girl came over and asked if she would go shoe shopping with her after work.

“I’d like to, but I can’t,” Medusa said. “I have some college applications to finish tonight.”

“What?” The Teenage Girl looked baffled. “College? You mean you’re moving away?”

“Well, yes. I was thinking I’d study abroad. I’d love to see the Snake Temple in Malaysia. And I just have to see the Merry Cemetery in Romania. I hear it’s beautiful. The gravestones are big and colorful and have poetry written on them.”

“But… But you can’t! What about my skirts? I buy them all here!”

“I’m sorry, but I want to move on. I’ve worked here for four years.”

Without another word, the Teenage Girl turned around and stormed out of the funeral home.

The next day, Medusa was walking to work when she saw the local billboard advertising her services. It was torn apart, the cardboard ripped right down the middle, and someone had spray-painted all over it. She became scared, but continued walking.

Soon the snakes started hissing, and she realized the townspeople were glaring at her as she made her way down the street.

A lady yelled, “My father’s on his deathbed! How will I ever get a statue of him if you quit?”

A man hollered, “My son was in a terrible car accident. What am I supposed to do if the doctors can’t save him?”

An older woman stopped her on the street and demanded, “Where am I supposed to get snakeskin clothes at affordable prices? Do you know how expensive they are?”

The Little Boy pointed and said, “Mommy, look, there’s the monster!”

“She’s a monster, all right,” his mother said. “So selfish. Only thinks of herself.”

The snakes hissed protectively, so no one came too close to her. Still, Medusa began running. She ran until she reached the funeral home, where she jumped into the arms of the Undertaker.

“Everyone hates me now!” she said. “It’s because I’m quitting and moving away!”

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” the Undertaker said. “You’ve been a great help all these years. It’s time for you to move on.”

Both of them jumped as a brick came flying through the window, shattering glass all over the floor. Someone from outside shouted, “We know she’s in there!”

“We won’t let her quit!” Medusa recognized the voice of the Widower.

“She can’t do this to us!” That came from the Teenage Girl. “We need her!”

The Undertaker said to Medusa, “You stay inside. I can handle this.”

Medusa watched from the window as the Undertaker went outside, stood in front of the funeral home and faced down the angry mob that had gathered there.

“She’s not here,” the Undertaker said. “And whoever threw that brick is going to have to pay for my window!”

Someone threw a small rock, and it hit the Undertaker in the forehead. The mob kept shouting and tried to push him out of the way so they could open the door. The rocks they threw became bigger and bigger. But he stayed on his feet, guarding the door, until suddenly he clutched his chest and started gasping for breath.

The mob pulled away as Medusa rushed outside just in time to catch the Undertaker before he collapsed. She laid him on the ground and tried to revive him, but it was no use. His poor heart had given out.

As the snakes hissed and bared their fangs, Algol the spitting cobra raised himself higher, bared his fangs, and spat out his venom. The venom sprayed the Widower and instantly turned him to stone. Algol spat again and turned the Teenage Girl into stone, along with a girl standing next to her. The rest of the crowd ran away in fright.

Medusa carried the Undertaker to the roof of the funeral home, where she cried over his body and turned him to stone. There she stood his statue up for all to see, so the guilty townspeople would never forget what they did.

What happened to Medusa after that, the townspeople never knew, and her Mother and Father wouldn’t tell.

Some believe she left for college like she planned, and became an undertaker in a different country where no one knew her.

Some believe she went globe-trotting to find others like herself.

Some believe she now lives in a cabin in the swampy wilderness, surrounded by snakes.

But wherever Medusa went after the Undertaker’s death, she was not alone. Her snakes were with her. They were the only real friends she’d ever had, and the only friends she’d ever needed.

Särah Nour is a freelance journalist based in Fargo, North Dakota. Her poetry has been published in Stone Path Review, Red Weather, and The Poetry Rag. Her short stories have been published in Northern Narratives and Mirrors and Thorns: An OWS Ink Dark Fairy Tale Anthology. She has also written for Listverseand HubPages. When not writing, she likes to cook, paint, and walk dogs at her local animal shelter.

www.sarahnourwriter.com

by Gretchen Tessmer

brush of silver fish
black fish
skimming water
lazy eyes-in-glass
fittings, filtered in pastel
watercolors cupped by
fountains of red
water, not blood
(no, not exactly)
but stained in blackberry
shades of gowns
grown in damp glades
worn by dark-haired
dryads in (more active)
waiting
daggers drawn
and ready
to rid the woods
of iron-boned
and oil-soaked monsters
wherever found—
bodies drowned
and offered up
to entropy

Gretchen Tessmer is a writer/attorney based in the U.S./Canadian borderlands of Northern New York. Her work has most recently appeared or will appear in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Star*Line, Abyss & Apex, and Nature: Futures.

by V. F. Thompson

Lights and sounds and heavy air, all around.

The man accepts the drink with grateful weariness. Tipping the bartender with a hollow smile, he raises the glass and sips. Some fruit he can’t quite place, fine Irish crème, and a sprig of fresh mint. The  bartender flickers in the swirling colors, his impish face mirroring the smile before turning away.

He closes his eyes, head swimming. The music cavorts and capers around him, tousling his hair and teasing his ears. It is like heavy scented oil, smothering the mind in sensations. Seeking solace, he sips his beverage. It tastes sweet and sad. It is familiar to him, though he can’t place where he has tasted something like it before. Electric beats grasp his brain and squeeze, hijack his heartbeat and force it to pound along. The air is salty-slick from life and sweat, undercut by glimpses of a fresher, fleeting smell.

A glance towards the dance floor, where bodies cease plurality and became one undulating thing. In the center stands the high tree, glistening in the twirling candy-wrapper colors that bounce every which way. An enormous silver-wooded oak, leaves scattering the dance floor and crunching underfoot. Looking makes him dizzy. Looking made him remember.

Absent fingers slide down a russet hand, itching to rub a silver ring that isn’t there.

Drink still unfinished, he stands to leave.

With nowhere to go, he sits back down.

A pretty blond boy in a tank top smiles at him from over the shoulder of a burly man in a leather jacket. His teeth flash blue, then green, then red in the changing lights. The man smiles back, through the other end of a telescope. The boy is young and bright. The man is too tired to be young and too young to be this tired. They are worlds apart.

The room dips. Surely he hasn’t drunk that much. It spins round and round like ribbons around the maypole before righting itself with prompt dignity.

He could dance. Lose himself in the crowd. Forget his voice in the voices of others.

He doesn’t want to lose himself.

He doesn’t want to forget.

He doesn’t want to remember.

“You’ve got that look,” says a gruff voice. His head turns. There, next to him, is an older gentleman nursing a glass so tall that even at half-mast it looks almost empty.

“I’m sorry?” the man asks. Music gobbles up his voice, but the stranger seems to hear it just fine.

“You’ve lost something,” says the stranger. He sniffs, clearing his throat. The colored lenses of his sunglasses catch the bouncing lights and throw them away. Creases fall across his jowls; jewels of sweat glisten on his brow.

“I’m afraid you’re wrong,” the man says, shaking his head politely.

“Bullshit,” the stranger replies, punctuating it with another sip of his drink. It twinkles, golden and shimmering. “I’d know that look anywhere.” His fine-grain sandpaper voice doesn’t rise over the music, doesn’t cut across it. Rather, it barrels a path straight through it, carelessly shouldering the sound out of the way. It is a voice that could have worn down mountains were it not so worn down itself.

“I haven’t lost anything,” the man says, thoughtless fingers brushing empty ones. And then, before he can stop himself, before he knows why: “I gave something away.”

Silence bubbles around them and pops as the music intrudes. Pink lenses flash at him as the older man stares through him. A harsh donkey bray snort, too sad to be laughter and too bitter to be anything else. “Yeah,” the stranger says. “Me too, kid. Me too.”

And then, his voice weaving through the music like glimmering threads, he begins to speak:

A tale to tell, a tale to hear, I bring

Of when I lived another greener life

Would you believe that once I was a king?

Afore I handed my land unto strife?

Rolling hills and rolling waves of wheat

Silks and pott’ry and red vineyards fine

Skies pink and blue and green all at my feet

Air thick with Magics rich and sweet as wine

Spriggans grin’d in soot-dark barrow hills

Pixies dipped and danced in forests green

Over hills where Pookas leapt and ran…

… wait, no, I…

In halls where dancing and music mocked sleep…

… All was as it should be in those days…

… Er, damn, my drink doth make this verse a toil…

Where was I?

Goddam.

Forget it. I always hated those crusty old verses. I can never quite get the iambs and trochees sorted out… Right. You miserable gits just forged right on ahead, with your gears and your steam engines and your goddam TV antennas. You forgot, or you chose to forget. It didn’t matter then, sure as hell doesn’t matter now.

It didn’t matter how many Changelings we left. “Damn, what an ugly baby,” you’d say, and raise the little bastard like it popped out of your own wombs. Didn’t matter how many plates we rearranged in your houses, or how many pots of gold we hid. Didn’t matter how loudly we blared our music in November on the rath. You just stopped giving a damn.

Bit by bit we forgot too. We forgot, and we ventured out into your world to find new lives.

I stayed, of course, and I wasn’t alone. But as I watched my land empty, I felt my faith fall. I was not alone. We broke our world—and something else came to fill in the cracks.

Swift, it was, too. Some of us called it the Rot, some of us called it the Decay, some of us didn’t call it jack diddly shit because we were too busy crumbling to dust. Rolling over the land, consuming, eating everything it touched. Maybe it was alive, some thing from who-knows-where that saw an opportunity and pounced. Maybe it was just our own foolish loss of faith. And maybe it was the land losing faith in itself.

So here I am, stuck here in this goddamned bar. The goddamned music’s too goddamned loud, but hey, the drink is good at least.

You see this? This is the last of the mead made with honey from Faerie’s hives. The last of it. Taste it. Go on! Taste it.

Does it taste like guilt? It should. You forgot. You all forgot. Does it burn like shame on your tongue, in your damned human throat? It bloody well should!

It should.

It does for me…

Looking at the sleeping man, he puts his lips to his glass. The sour-sweet flavor of the mead still singes his tongue, tainting his own drink. Poor old son of a bitch. Batty as an old church tower, of course, but still. There had been a sadness in those eyes so profound that it had burned through the lenses of his glasses. What has happened to him, the man wonders, to drive him to such fanciful ramblings?

Around them, people laugh and cry and live. He wonders if they hadn’t heard the man’s ranting, or if they simply don’t care.

Unconscious fingers slide over empty fingers.

As he sips, he realizes where he has tasted the flavor before. It was the taste of his husband’s lips. It is the taste of old church bells whose song had grown morose with age and rust. It is the taste of old pages that have long since withered to yellow, the text bleeding itself into illegibility with age. It is the taste of the air here in the bar, beneath the sweat and heat and boiling colors.

He takes another sip.

“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” says a voice. This one worms its way through the music, slipping through tight spaces in the sound.

He turns to see a younger man leaning against the bar. His black T-shirt is tight enough to swiftly execute any imagination, his jet-black hair plucking colors from the air and trying them on before discarding them with idle carelessness. He too wears sunglasses, though in the shifting lights, it is impossible to tell the color of the lenses. He cocks an angular thumb at the man passed out over the counter. “He gets like that sometimes. I’ve tried to kick him out, but he always just finds his way back in.”

“It’s all right,” the man replies. It was, too. As crazy as the old rambler might have been, there had been an odd splendor in his words. They had melded with the music, clasping hands with the beats, whittling away the surging, jumping notes to reveal the lament underneath. Even now, the music seems only to be a mask over that melancholy taste in the air.

“Suit yourself,” says the young man. A marker slips from his pocket, and he doodles something obscene on the counter. “As for me, there’s only so much of his rambling I can take.”

“Who is he?” he asks.

The young man looks up from his artwork. Though it is impossible to tell behind the glasses, he is sure that the young man winks at him. “You heard the old son of a gun, didn’t you? He’s a king.” He grins with teeth that are too perfect, as if they have been laid in place rather than grown. “Though between the two of us, he’s just as much of a queen as the rest of ’em.” He cocks his head towards the dance floor. “Care for a dance?”

He looks at the young man in the tight shirt, and he looks at the dance floor. He looks at the oak tree, and he looks at the door across the room where a burly bouncer hovers and watches. He looks at his naked hand, at his empty glass.

He shakes his head. “No, thank you,” he says. “I think it’s time for me to go. It’s getting late.”

“Isn’t that all the more reason to dance?” asks the young man. He slips the marker back into his pocket, evidently satisfied with his defacement. A drawing crass enough to make all but the seediest sailors blush adorns the counter. “Still, have it your way.”

The man stands, nods a thank-you to the bartender, and walks off into the crowd.

By the bar, the one they once called Robin Goodfellow swipes a glass from a passing waiter, grimacing at the taste. Beer. Even worse, American beer. Still, he takes another sip, watching as the man is swallowed by the music and the lights. It’s a shame, he thinks. He was a rather handsome fellow, too.

He doesn’t bother to see whether he reaches the doors or whether he is lost to the crowd. Instead, he looks at the old man asleep on the counter. A two-step tango of uncharacteristic sincerity twirls over his lips before dissolving into the light. He sighs, running fingers over the old man’s sweat-slicked head.

“Goodnight, my king,” he whispers, his voice the softest of backbeats to the music.

He turns, slipping off into the colors to enjoy himself. Passing a pair of arguing lovers, he whistles in their direction. Immediately, they fall into a tearful embrace. Once again he dons that well-worn grin. With the big man asleep, there is much mischief to be wrought tonight.

Behind him on the bar the Fae-King sleeps

Lids and liquor drap’d o’er well-worn eyes

Reverie into his mind does creep

In nighttime dreams in Faerie fields he lies.

V. F. Thompson is a writer whose work primarily focuses on the relationship between the real and the mythic and the way that they intertwine. Her stories have been published in several small press magazines and anthologies. In addition to the fantastic, much of her work focuses on queer and LGBT themes. She currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she also performs as a living statue. When not writing, she can be found drinking a strong cup of tea, devouring comic books, or concocting new recipes.

www.facebook.com/vivian.f.thompson

by Liz Westbrook-Trenholm

Therid perched high in a lookout tree where he could spy on the new ground creatures’ warren. The branches overhung the escarpment marking the divide between jungle and desert. Far below, mounds clustered at the edge of the big sand that stretched empty to blue hills on  the horizon. The mounds were the same brown as the desert and pierced by openings like the burrow entrances and air holes of some oversized ground sloth. But these burrow mounds were rectilinear and lay in a grid formation, as if the wind had impossibly driven the sand into miniature mesas of perfect symmetry. The piercings were evenly spaced and shaped into rectangles and arches. Patterns of interlocking squares and triangles framed the openings, their shapes like gems chosen specially from a rare geode. Not shiny, yet intriguing.

A herd of the creatures crawled out of an arch, short, stocky and clustered like their burrow mounds. They surrounded a moving carapace, earthbound like them and dragging itself along the trail. It grumbled, like a beast on the hunt. They passed eventually out of Therid’s sight under the lip of the escarpment and after a time he heard the beast’s growl and the rattle of grit under their feet as they climbed the trail they had carved into the face of the cliff. Heavy, clomping feet, these beings had, unnerving.

Therid lifted sharply above the jungle canopy and then drifted down again, deeper into its camouflaging embrace. He should have fled altogether but curiosity held him, watching through the flicker of leaves. In the clawful of visits he’d made since finding the place during Spring-search, he’d never seen the beings up close.

They trudged into view, squat, with snubby snouts and broad skulls clasped tight with some sort of head cap. So heavy those heads must be to need such thick necks and massive bodies to carry them. Foreshortened and graceless, they seemed laden with the weight of their own being as if contact with the ground had compacted their bones.

As they progressed along their trail, Therid followed parallel to them, keeping well into the trees. They stopped when the trail ended, abruptly, at the jungle wall. The grumbling beast moved forward and began consuming the trees, mashing and tearing at them with jaws that had suddenly opened in its face. Was it feeding? Therid had thought it a carrier of some sort, but perhaps it lived. Perhaps it needed to eat the jungle. But he saw that the beast spat out the shreds of what it took in, spewing the digested material to each side of the gouge it made. The beings tending it spread grit the beast had hauled in its belly on the ground. The beast backed and trampled the grit flat, and then began chewing again.

Not a beast, Therid suddenly realized. A tool. A huge, complicated tool. The ground creatures were using the tool to extend their trail. But why? There was nothing beyond its end but more jungle. And Therid saw no sign of their using the jungle, not for camouflage, not for food. Was it a kind of Spring-search of their own, establishing a territory line? Not possible. They were ground animals, not people.

The beast-machine gave a sudden rising moan and ceased to chew. The creatures rushed around it, prodding it with sticks of various shapes, making barking, chattering noises, like the songless ground things they were. One thrust its forelimb into the machine’s maw. The moan suddenly reverted to its former rumble but the creature screamed high and fell back, its forelimb truncated and spouting.

To Therid’s surprise, it did not leak dust or gravel, but wet red blood, spouting from firm raw flesh. He fluttered closer, trying to smell as well as see, forgetting, almost, to keep his fringes fluttering in synchrony with the leaves of the canopy, to keep his camouflage. He clung to a sapling, staring, waiting. As the other creatures crowded and bent over their companion, he waited. And as the creature stilled and ceased its struggle, he waited. Soon, or eventually, they would lose interest in their companion, and wander off. That’s how it was with ground beings.

He waited.

❦

There are five of us left. Out of the five hundred real that had set out, all but we are gone. Some, faded from grief at the many failed attempts to find a new Eden and some flung themselves into stars to end their eternal boredom.

Joneman lost many golems on the last world we tried. They drowned in their own blood during eruptions of sulphuric gases that roiled up from its lush and friendly surface. It saddened Joneman, who is very fond of his golems. We fled that deceptive world, latest of a string of failures, plunging into the deep sleep, barely caring if we wakened again, letting our Cradle seek another chance for us.

And it found us this. So lovely, the gorgeous umbers, golds, and pinks of the desert, the lush mauves and purples of the jungle, fluttering and sighing like a berobed lady in layered mantillas. The others are ecstatic, convinced. They cultivate golems and, with the optimism of forgetfulness, set them to build as once we had long ago, on that sweet blue and green world where we’d dwelt so many millennia, before our golems fouled it beyond bearing. This will be a new Earth.

So the others think, except for Joneman. Joneman sleeps, his troubled dreams surfacing just enough to let us know he has not faded, yet. He remains too discouraged to join us, despite the visions of this handsome place that we send to his dreams. I fear he too will soon let himself dwindle. Then there will be four, and I, I…

I think this world is seeking a way to kill us, forever and at last. I feel it waiting, watching.

And so I gather golems, mine and Joneman’s, and go out to engage it. And it’s wasted no time in the attempt, however misdirected. I am sorry to have squandered one of Joneman’s golems so early. But, Joneman, if you’d been awake, you’d have stopped me. Or joined me.

The other golems keen and croon at the loss, as is their wont. They look to me hopefully, as to Joneman, who might once have resubstantiated this individual, so great was his force. Not now. And little good has ever come of that. Somehow, their plaintiveness tries me and I am tempted to deactivate them all out of pique at their presumptuousness. But I don’t. Such is my ambivalence. Meanwhile, this one has died, and so now I must take it back for recycling. It’s the least I can do, for Joneman.

Weeping, the golems load the corpse onto the road builder and the jungle seems to answer in protest. It shifts and shimmers ceaselessly, troubling to my eye and mind.

❦

Therid vibrated his fringes in anticipation. The creatures were milling around the dead one. They would soon return to huddle mindlessly in their burrows. They had no camouflage, no knowledge of blending into their surroundings. Go, he urged them. Leave the prize to me. Already he imagined the interest of the females when he arrived at the flocking tree with his craw stuffed with fresh red meat.

With growing disbelief, however, Therid watched them lift the corpse and load it onto the beast machine. When they raised their arms like mourning wings, he screamed in shock.

One being turned sharply and scanned the canopy. Therid froze, but for the ripple of his fringe with the breeze. The being’s gaze swept by him, unseeing. He’d begun to relax when it seemed to collect itself. Slowly, but with unhesitating confidence, it retraced the arc of its search until it found him. Its eyes had dizzying lines of shiny blue radiating away from a fathomless darkness in a round centre. They entered him like a stranger intruding into a rookery, dropping him into mindless chick terror, easy picking for any predator with eyes to see him.

❦

Joneman is here! Jungle tricking and puzzling me and then Joneman, seeing it differently than I. Frail that he is, he yet fills me with an immediate and vivid presence laced with excitement. He launches boisterously into a proposal, the offer of a bargain. His excitement and mine transmit to the other three in city and desert, turning them toward our negotiation.

First Baelwit, distracted from his tunnelling under the city; then jeFO, rising from drifting inner contemplation in the desert into a dance that raises an orange storm; and, finally, grudgingly, Enelra turning her attention from the mortarless mosaics she makes her golems build and rebuild. When she sees Joneman’s plan, her disapproval seeps into the crevices of our self-doubt like the poisonous ground clouds of our last planet. Enelra calls herself a loving mother and is, in fact, an arbitrary bully, seeking always to govern, restrict, force conformity to her limited ways. She is the one who would confine us to the city, limit the golems to mindless automatons of briefest existence, offering them her protective love but truly giving them only death, early to all, earlier to those who show a spark of will or simply do not appeal to her. Not just her own golems, but all of ours, as well. She would gladly suffocate us in her empty officiousness.

Her displeasure adds savour to my satisfaction at accepting Joneman’s offer. I lay my hand on the still golem and my essence flows, silver into its wounds. I restore its hand and, for good measure, mend the nicks and scars its brief life has inflicted on it, despite the extra cost to me. For Joneman, only perfection will do. The other golems fall on their knees making gratingly grateful cries. I do this for Joneman, not for them.

But then a fierce pulse of joy demolishes all lesser moods in a mighty radius. jeFO dances up a storm, Baelwit stamps his feet till the city shakes and even Enelra smears a patina of pleasure over her sulk. For Joneman keeps his bargain.

The mended golem rises, smiling. Joneman glows within, feeding, growing, with us again. The other golems weep and gesticulate, and, for once, I’m at one with them. As they swarm about us, I fall on his neck, and kiss his cheek, and celebrate the return of Joneman, my friend, my love, my reason for being. They lift us up and carry us triumphant toward the city, and I am not angry. I love them, and I pull off the helmets of those who carry us and kiss their shaggy heads, one by one until they glow silver with my Essence and I am nearly spent. But Joneman has returned, and I am whole again.

❦

Therid lifted out of the canopy, and fled fast, back to the flocking place, his heart and mind chaotic with confusion. He plummeted gracelessly onto the speaking limb of the flocking tree, gaping with the effort of his rapid flight. He had just breath to call once, but his urgency spread, call by call until the furthest members of the flock assembled from their daily tasks. By then, his breath recovered, he told them of the new creatures, of the one that lost its paw to its beast. Creatures that were made of meat, and that bled red. Several royal warriors chattered skeptically.

“The red meat, show us, your craw, full,” chortled Mottrack, a huge and handsome hunter who always won the best nest and the finest mate. He roosted at the top of the tree in the first and last rays of the Sun. A magnificent half geode, sparkling with gems, hung in fibre-vine netting among the feathers of his thorax, a weight only a mighty flyer like he could bear. He could afford to be kind in his mockery.

“Shines, the Sun, on your royal plumage,” Therid acknowledged Mottrack’s greatness, then continued his tale. “The ground beings, with the corpse,” he paused for effect, “stayed.”

Beaks chattered with disquiet and a lesser person, barely two levels up the tree from Therid, pecked him. He pecked back, hard, and the person ducked under the force of his certainty. That person would sleep three levels lower this night, Therid thought, with satisfaction. He fluttered his fringes and went on.

“The beings, the body, lifted.” Now cries of protest rang out but he pressed on. “Limbs, raised.” Other persons pecked him, and Therid fluttered out of reach of their beaks, but without submission. “Eyes, saw me!” he cried.

“Shame!” “Liar!” Pecks and accusations rained on him, but he would not, could not stop. It was so hard to explain and what came next would be even more difficult but Therid knew he had to let them know what he had seen. “Eyes, shiny!” The noise reduced a little. “Shine, rose. Shine, shone, in me! Eyes shone, saw, in me!” Complete silence fell. “Shine set. Me, dark. Sad.” Therid rocked from foot to foot, struggling to show the flock. “Creature, its paw, on the corpse.” Therid curled his wing, and spread the fringes over his breast, to show them. Then he ducked his head, as if in sleep, tucking the fringes of one wing up to hide them. He lifted his head then, showing them his eyes. “Corpse woke.” He unfurled his fringes. “Paw, came back. Shine, rose.” He flittered, trying to tell how it had been, to describe the moment when joy bloomed. “Sun after winter dark. Wind, warm for mating.” Before him, Mottrack loomed, like a purple mountain, his aggression ruff spread wide and thick.

“Enough.”

But Therid could not. “In the corpse. In the eyes.”

“Enough”.

“Rose, Sun. Shone, Sun.”

Mottrack reared with a flare of fringes the colour of angry thunderheads, sunlight lancing off the gems on his thorax and claws splayed to tear.

❦

Therid hid in a thorny grove few knew of, exhausted from flying, sore and leaking from the blows and pecks with which the flock had pummelled him. Ground creatures did not feel for their dead. That would denote mind. Animals had no mind. No sun shone in their eyes. To say otherwise was a travesty.

He had escaped Mottrack’s talons, or Mottrack had let him go, unthinkable as that was. Perhaps he’d not wanted to sully his claws, leaving it to the lesser of the flock. These had fallen on Therid, screaming, beating at him with their wings, tearing at him with their claws, striking at him with their beaks. Yet somehow, he’d escaped it all. Perhaps the Sun in the waking corpse had saved him. He dreamed on that for a while, calling to the shine that had come into his mind so briefly, but no answer came.

He heard something wriggling through the narrow entrance to his hiding place. A predator to finish him, swallow him whole, perhaps. So be it. He was flockless, morn and night.

It was his nest-kin, the smaller, who had survived because Therid had been generous, or weak. And his nest-kin’s mate. Followed by the mate’s dam. And then—more of them, until at least seven crowded into the place.

“Come to finish me, you?” Therid asked. His nest-kin chickered and gently preened Therid’s tattered fringe away from the worst of his hurts. His kin’s mate coughed mother-heal into the wounds which stung even as he felt it begin to weave them closed. He was confused, but let himself sink into recovery shock, panting to speed his healing.

When he’d closed his beak at last, hurts mended and the mother-heal expelled before chick madness could take him; his nest-kin could wait no more.

“The beast-tool, was it meat?” Before Therid could answer, the kin-mater asked, “The eyes, the ones that the creature put on and in you, were they good, like Sun, or were they bad, like predator?”

“The limb, truly the beast ate it? And they stayed, unafraid?”

“Of course, unafraid, when they can make dead live and limb grow.”

All had opinions, and more questions. And calls for detail. And chatter and sharing and then the highest of that low group calling, “Let him tell it again. Therid, tell it, the story, all of it, again.” And he did.

They decided. “For ourselves, we must see.”

Before the sun set, they had begun the journey back to where Therid had seen what he had seen, flocking close, like chicks to their dam. They rested in a thick tree that night, nervous with the strangeness, and the danger. They set out again at first light, pausing only to harvest food from among sleepy night creatures that never saw them coming. They flew until they reached the shocking gash in the jungle. They saw for themselves the dark patch in the dust where the ground creature had died, and risen.

❦

The celebration lasts for all time and for one night, all at once, in that clever happy way we haven’t enjoyed for millennia, even before we abandoned Earth. Joneman keeps to his risen golem, making it his home, reinforcing its being and structure to withstand his full Essence, which glows from its eyes and shimmers around its form. We revel in his presence. He has not been so alive since first we settled on Earth, that richest home of so many before.

At last, I, always the spoiler with the question, ask, “Why do you wake again, Joneman? My love, I’d feared we’d lost you.”

“We have a new home,” he replies. We all focus on him, warily.

“Yes, a new home; we told you that,” Baelwit says for us all.

“But you didn’t care to hear,” Enelra adds snidely. “Hiding in the cradle and leaving all the work to us.”

Our obtuseness amuses Joneman. “A home,” he repeats, “with inhabitants.”

I feel a shiver of apprehension but jeFO cheers, “WE inhabit it!” and dances so contagiously that Baelwit stamps in unison until the ground shakes. Enelra’s walls are rattling and she snaps at them to stop the silly dancing. None of them feel what Joneman is saying.

“All right, Joneman, sweetheart,” I say. “Tell us.”

“I will show you,” he says. And, as I’d feared, leads us to the top of the escarpment where he had returned to us. Mauve and plum fronds flutter over our road, always fluttering.

“Plants!” huffs Enelra in disgust. “You brought us here for plants.”

“I’m fond of plants,” I say, even though this shimmying forest makes me uneasy.

As if to chide my pretence a chittering sound startles out of the ever-moving mass and then a frond detaches from a sinewy trunk and drifts above the road. This is like no creature we have seen in all our millennia: bird, snake, fronds that ripple like the jungle as it drifts with slow pulses of fringed wings. It has opaque violet ovals wrapping a third of its head, which it turns from side to side on its long, sinewy neck, scanning us. Eyes, ears, or both, they flicker and sparkle with life and, oh Joneman, I see the cause for your joy now.

I see intelligence. Not golem-gifted cunning, but true, alien, other-ish intelligence.

A beaklike thing low on its head splits into serrated blades that click and add nuance to trilling cries. The sounds are quite lovely.

“What are these golems?” Enelra demands. “Who made them?” Even she can see what they are.

Baelwit expressed her real fear. “Another lives here? Like Us? That we must expel?”

Joneman beams on him. “Fear not,” he says. “They are godless.”

“Abandoned?” Enelra asks.

“Godless,” Joneman repeats.

“Then how did golems come about?” Enelra demands, forever and always the least nimble of intellect.

“They arose spontaneously,” I conclude, and I shiver again. We are the only other unraised. Until now.

Joneman walks forward in his golem body to meet the being and his golems cry out in pleading and fear, like the sheep they are. The creature rises, drops and rises again on tentacles that stiffen and straighten, coil and straighten again in a fluttering dance that makes JeFO spin, singing happily and raising plumes of dust that rise among its fluttering fronds like smoke or incense.

Another seeming tangle of foliage detaches from the forest edge and resolves itself into a companion of the first being. As it begins to dance as well, it is joined by another, and another and two more, all similar, yet subtly different in shade and size. Joneman’s golems rush to his defence but he calms them with a gesture and they too become caught in the moment, dancing in their stolid, soil bound way. The dance is like a giant, animated flower blossoming and closing, with Joneman and the golems the stem in its midst and jeFO twining about them. The dance speaks of meeting and speaking and, most of all, an essence utterly beyond what I have so far comprehended. Alliance, perhaps, like that of our own kind. Equal to equal? I am entranced.

Enelra quivers. “They worship.”

I wait for Joneman to correct her.

“The sun, for lack of an Other,” Joneman says.

I disagree. That is not what their dance says! Joneman soothes my disquiet with the balm of his presence in my mind.

“I shall have them,” Enelra stakes her claim with her usual presumption. “They require love and order.”

“They will build great monuments,” Baelwit thunders and, after an ominous instant of standoff, the two form their agreement, seeing how perfectly their wants mesh.

JeFO batters their solidity with her inarticulate disagreement. She wants spontaneity, joy, and some kind of spirit only she has and can breathe into a few mad golems who survive their creation by her.

I look to Joneman, who seems not merely content, but percolating with pleasure.

“They are independent,” he says.

“Rebellious?” Enelra bridles. “Eliminate those.”

“They are no one’s!” I exclaim.

Joneman’s mind glows with agreement.

JeFO, in solid form part golem and part inhabitant, leaps and soars like a geyser, understanding. It takes Enelra and Baelwit longer to grasp what Joneman is telling us. That these beings are uncreated, in no one’s image, mental or otherwise. They are free, unimprinted. And intelligent. They will have to be won, and it will not be easy.

JeFO claps and laughs. “Spirit! Being! Inspiration! Dancing!” At least, those are roughly the concepts embedded in her outpourings.

Enelra and Baelwit talk about potential to be moulded, order to be constructed, and monuments. Always monuments. It’s how they contain and constrain jeFO’s exuberance.

And I…

“Joneman.” I call him.

“What is the complaint now!” Enelra snaps.

“We will multiply, Joneman?” I ask.

“Yes.”

More explosive joy. We are so bored with each other, we five. They still don’t understand.

“We shall have war,” I say.

That sobers them a moment.

But jeFO, always jeFO, breaks the moment.

She cheers and claps. “Above and beyond! Others above self! Courage under!” Fleetingly I wonder if Joneman puts her up to it.

Enelra and Baelwit chant responsively about strategy, destructive capability, orderly planning, and fortification. They plan their customary alliance which over the eons has always collapsed into mutual pummelling until they and their golems are spent.

“Oh, Joneman,” I plead.

Joneman’s face is turned from me.

The lovely flower of the Inhabitants’ dance opens and closes in a loop of innocence that I wish could last forever.

“Remember Neanderthal,” I say.

“Brainless. Disobedient,” Enelra snapped.

“Poor builders.” Baelwit, of course.

“Innocent,” I said. “Until us.”

“Until you,” Joneman murmured in gentle admonishment, for, yes, when Neanderthal’s mind could not seem to grow to encompass our magic, it had been I who raised Cro-Magnon, who grew and flourished into descendants whose comfortable solution to their innocent neighbours was genocide. Havoc and destruction lay always in the wake of what I had made.

“A good game, a good game!” jeFO cries. And it had been, so compelling a battle, we multiplied in our exuberance, and, in our exuberance distorted what we’d found. So rose the golems instead, facsimiles of the simple originals, so much cleverer, yet as little like them as a Chihuahua to a wolf.

“Joneman,” I say. “These are innocents. Let us leave them, before we poison their world as we poisoned Earth.”

Joneman turns his gaze on me, but, before I know what he would tell me, a purple storm plunges onto the dancers. Through a tumult of deep purple I see the dancer’s slender neck crushed in a massive indigo beak. The limp body is tossed up, caught, and given a sharp shake. An orb of stone and amethyst sparkles on the monster’s chest as it dangles its victim by the neck and smashes it into the dust of the road. With claws extended from its stiffened lower tentacles, it rakes deep slices into the dancer’s body. Its blood is red. My rage is redder.

Even as Joneman and I surge forward, JeFO, spinning blindly in her contemplation of the chaos of war, blunders into them. The great thing flaps up and gashes her feathered shoulders. It turns on Joneman then, slashing and screaming a harsh, clacking sound. Joneman’s golems rush to his defence and I urge mine with them just as another monstrous thing drops as if from nowhere, and then another, all purple fronds, beaks, and clawed tentacles lashing.

Our golems are soft and vulnerable with no weapons to hand, yet heavy and lethal with loyal rage. They are soon sliced and bleeding, staggering under the onslaught of slashing beaks, clubbing wings, and tearing razor feet. Arms over my head, I rush into one such hellish fury and kick out while punching and tearing at anything I can seize. Acidic slashes split my body’s forearms and shoulders, sucking hard on my essence to close them again, tiring me. A dancer leaps, clinging, pecking, and clawing on the neck of the monster I am fighting. In a flurry of mauve fronds, another materializes aboard one of the tentacles my adversary has planted in the chest of the one it’s killed. They are defending me.

The battle the dancers bring to the powerful dark killers is feeble but distracts them. As my adversary twists its beak around to snap at the annoyance, I kick up into the momentary clear space beneath its thorax. For all its fearsomeness, a blow to its keel bone collapses it into a panting tangle of fronds and writhing tentacles.

It is done a few moments later. Our golems stagger or lie on the ground, surrounded by collapsed creatures, some large and deep purple, some small and mauve, all panting with gaping beaks, the dancers and the attackers alike. Red blood meets red blood in the road.

Enelra rises high, wrapped in glowing purple magnificence, a glowing sun-disc radiating around her head, massive feathered wings spread wide to frame her pouting breast. She looks part Renaissance seraphim, part Aztec god, part pigeon, and entirely ridiculous. She’s not quite able to give up the human visage with its Kore smile she’d adopted so many millennia ago and used to such devastating purpose.

Still, to a dazed Inhabitant, she no doubt looks impressive and, I suspect, terrifyingly ugly. Graciously, she bends to a shattered purple monster and, with a silver touch, heals it. She’s made her choice.

“So the war begins, Joneman,” I say.

The frail, mauve beings in the road bleed and pant and look helplessly to Joneman. And to me. I am sorry, so very, very sorry.

❦

Therid lay, seeing all and knowing nothing. How could this be? His nest-kin, limp, broken, dead in the dirt of this road. Mottrack, mighty Mottrack, crushed beyond flying, his gorgeous plumage and thorax jewel dulled by yellow dust. No more fine hunts. No more best mates. Finished.

And then a monster forms, misshapen wings and hideous visage glowing with dark light. It touches not Mottrack, but Smoatin, one of the most thuggish warriors, lowest of his caste. Smoatin shakes himself, rises, and offers homage to the monster.

How could a being of mind make such a choice? This must be the true being’s enemy. It’s not too late. Therid looks to the one with Sun rising in its eyes. This one can fix broken paws. Can it fix broken wings? Crushed bodies? But the Sun one will not meet Therid’s eye, will not enter him as before. Dark, then.

Therid flutters, dragging toward the forest. Camouflage first, then thought. A touch stops him, cool as winter rains on his wounds. Hypnotic eyes meet his, calling to him to give his mind. They are not Sun, but predator eyes. He has been a fool to think otherwise.

He struggles toward the forest’s protection, fighting the call. The struggle becomes easier, and he realizes his hurts are healed. Then, wonder of wonders, his dead nest-kin joins him, chittering. And the others, those dead or hurt, now alive and whole, flee with him into the forest.

Falling behind, Therid pauses just within a cluster of protective fronds, unable to resist a last look. Bright eyes captured him, but did not hold him. They spoke to him, invited his worship, or his complicity. They stretched and pulled at his thoughts. He saw himself, Therid, roosting at the top of the tree, the very top, in the first and last sunlight of the day. Power vibrated at his frond tips, like warmth at dawn’s edge. It would be power as great as Mottrack’s, greater. He need only serve and worship.

“How?” Therid had to ask. “What meat can I bring? What strength offer to mothers of chicks? What protection from predators?”

From me, all comes from me, the voice in his head told him. Serve, worship, believe.

A thought came then, so faint it nearly evaporated under the warm power of the urge to bask in belief, belief without painful questioning.

Mottrack had not been his enemy, but his superior, proven by size and accomplishment, by the rule of the flock. But not his enemy until the shiny eyes with their silver touch came.

The silver touch.

So. Not Sun. A being, as much greater than Mottrack as Mottrack was compared to weak Therid. But not Sun.

❦

And so it begins. Joneman whom I loved, plays an old game anew, weaving promises of power to the meek to win these small ones to his side in exchange for worship of his supposed godhood. An old trick of mine, that, winning me many rounds in the game. Now he’s made it his.

The mauve beings stare at him, their huge oval eyes inscrutable, their alien thought processes elusive. Joneman glows with profligate power, pouring it into the seeds he’s planted in them, willing them to multiply, to increase his presence. Even so, one argues—argues!—back at Joneman. I feel Joneman’s surprised amusement, even as he seeks to win through argument and invasion. As usual, Enelra and Baelwit play god with the large, dominant ones, overwhelming them with force, brooking no resistance. Joneman and I know that, in the game to come. The clever ones will win the most and small must ever be more clever. Belief is a far greater motivator than fear. And jeFO, she whirls and has no thoughts but joy at a new game. And I—I am most reluctant to play at all.

Joneman’s little creature convulses. Its beak is wide, and it is wracked with hacking, wrenching coughs. Joneman, have we killed it? Vomit spills from its gullet, forming a pool silver with our little seeds that Joneman has so recklessly poured into it. Its thoughts are fading, silencing. Now its fellows are similarly hacking, coughing.

❦

Therid finished expelling the foreign mother-heal. He had almost succumbed to its seductive poison, almost lost himself, like a dam-bonded chick.

Mottrack and his hunters milled and flapped in the dust, still dancing homage, still in danger.

Therid called to them, “Expel! Expel the monster mother-heal!” They ignored him. They were the flock’s best hunters, mightiest protectors, strongest mates, and they were dancing their doom, and the destruction of them all. And it was his doing.

Therid rose as tall as he could. He stepped out of the jungle’s safe embrace. Making his voice high and strident, he squalled, “Who, now, top of tree?”

Mottrack whirled to face him, ruff raised against the challenge, fringes huge with threat, his caste-mates ruffling at his back.

Therid forced himself to move into the open space before them, resisting legs that begged to coil tight and low, fringes that cried to lift in homage or carry him away. Still he held tall. Mottrack’s neck coiled to strike.

Therid fluttered homage. And so that Mottrack would be sure, he chickered, “Homage. To Mottrack. No homage to Monster Creature.”

Mottrack hesitated. “Expel!” Therid cried again. “Not Great Knowing. Great Predator. Expel!”

“Healed my hurt,” Mottrack cried.

“Hurt you, before healing!” Therid cried back.

“There is no other God but she,” Mottrack shouted.

Therid blurted in his astonishment, “Chick-madness takes you?”

Mottrack struck, but clumsily. As he ducked Mottrack’s beak, Therid heard a hunter cough, then another. Even as Mottrack stalked him, they all vomited, cleansing themselves. All past chickhood understood to their cores the dangers of mother-heal madness, of selfhood shredded to fragments by the intrusion of a dam’s mind.

Still Mottrack came on. Therid spun and dodged until he found himself trapped between the monster’s misshapen feet. A dark, violet light engulfed him, the ugly visage bent to consume him.

Therid shot sideways and up, slashing at the monster’s head in passing. He twisted in midair and dove back down, claws tearing red creases across its shaggy purple shoulders. He screamed to his nest-kin’s mate to come, come now! The monster flailed at Therid but he slipped beyond her reach, up, up. The monster’s fringes lengthened, spread, and, cumbersomely, took the air, even as its wounds closed. Joining him, his nest-kin’s mate dove to slash but Therid cried to her, “Slash, then heal, give your mother-heal, nest-mother.” She flew up beside him, her head twitching side to side with doubt.

“Took us, the predators, with mother-heal. Your mother-heal, strike. Chick madness, give.”

She dropped into the dark glow of the monster, her fringes fluttering for balance, slashed, coughed into its wounds. It flapped heavily, its ground creatures wailing below. Mottrack flew up to its aid, but Therid dropped below him, diving onto the glowing head of the monster who had tried to take him, shame and hatred driving his beak hard. He was careful not to taste its blood. His nest-kin’s mate followed, coughing in each wound he made.

As one, the flock understood. The caste-mates dove at ground creature and monster alike, darting, slashing, retreating. None repeated the mistakes they’d made in trying to fight on the ground. Two other mothers who had come on the night’s journey joined the first and all three coughed, coughed, and coughed more. With each pass, Therid saw wounds reacting to the mother-heal, some closing, only to burst wide again, bubbling red and silver.

The nest-mothers flagged, their flying ragged, their coughs near dry. A ground creature batted hard and grazed one who was too slow.

“Away!” cried Therid and the flock plunged into the jungle, leaving only Mottrack. Therid watched, waited.

The monster shrank and lost its violet light and its fringes. Its ground-creature face twisted, its maw opening wide in a roar that chilled Therid to the core. A nest-mother called, sharp and chiding. The monster gathered into a crouch, staring at the jungle as the last of the glow died in its tiny eyes.

Mottrack coughed, great, wracking heaves that emptied him, bowed him to the ground. The vomit shimmered and squirmed as if alive, but grew still at last in the dry dust. Mottrack thrust high with all his mighty strength. He disappeared into the sky, flying toward the centre of the jungle.

The remaining flock rose as one to follow him. Therid stayed a moment longer, making sure. He could not find one creature without a wound. Most lay in the dust, twitching. Others flailed and emitted gurgling cries as mother-heal madness took them, cut off from the dams that had imprinted them yet with no minds of their own. They would die also.

One badly wounded creature crouched, panting as it stared at the jungle. Its shining eyes, once so dizzyingly captivating, roved back and forth. Therid let it find him. For a moment it stared, chick-madness dulling its eyes. Then a touch of intelligence returned. It raised its paw, the stubby claws extended. Its face split, showing white stones between its jaws. Then its light went out, and it fell.

❦

No one remains. And I—I am done. And glad of it. Let the Cradle die and fall. Expunge our presence from the universe. Live on, little wise one, and do better than we.

❦

Late that night, as only the top of the flocking tree remained in sun, Mottrack called to Therid as he flapped heavily into the clearing. Therid humbly bowed before the mighty leader, awaiting his sentence. Therid shifted to one side of his perch, making room.

“Here, Therid,” he said.

Confusion struck Therid speechless at first. Then he fluttered, in deepest submission. “For me, too dangerous,” he refused.

Mottrack, clacked his beak in surprise. “For Therid, monster-killer, flock-leader, too dangerous? Saw you truths, not saw I. Strong were you when weak was I.”

“Night predator likes tree top,” Therid replied. “Hunters keep flock safe. Get no sleep.”

Mottrack chuckered loudly with laughter, the flock joining him.

“Lower then at night, be you,” said Mottrack. “But top of tree, when council needed, is wise, wise Therid.”

Again, Therid demurred. “Saved us, the Dams.”

Mottrack’s ruff shifted and rose, but then smoothed down.

“Great must be the tree with top so great for such numerous council,” he said. And the flock laughed again. But Mottrack opened and shut his beak in silent respect. He would think on it, Therid saw. His nest-kin’s mate chickered and preened him.

On his accustomed perch that night, Therid slept dreamlessly as the hunters shared the watch. And so he did not see the streak of fire that slashed the sky into the desert.

Liz Westbrook-Trenholm has published or aired mainstream and speculative short fiction in Neo-Opsis, Prix Aurora-winning (2015) Bundoran Press anthology Second Contacts, Prix Aurora-winning (2016) Laksa Media’s The Sum of Us, and Bundoran’s upcoming 49th Parallels. She also writes comedic murder mysteries for Calgary entertainment company Pegasus Performances, with over eighty scripts produced. A retired public servant, Liz lives in Ottawa with her husband, writer and publisher Hayden Trenholm.