APEX MAGAZINE
ISSUE 81, FEBRUARY 2016

Jason Sizemore, Editor-In-Chief

Table of Contents

Editorial

Words from the Editor-in-Chief—Jason Sizemore

Fiction

The Beast at the End of Time—Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Anabaptist—Daniel Rosen

The Four Gardens of Fate—Betsy Phillips

On the Occasion of My Retirement—Nick Mamatas

Nonfiction

Interview with Author Benjanun Sriduangkaew—Andrea Johnson

Interview with Author David Demaret—Russell Dickerson

Poetry

Calabash—Mike Jewett

Little and Red—Crystal Lynn Hilbert

Arrhythmia—Heather Morris

Paper Unicorn—Laurel Dixon

Novel Excerpt

Glitch Rain—Alex Livingston

Words from the Editor-in-Chief

Jason Sizemore

Welcome to issue 81!

This month we’re back to normal in terms of volume. Even so, it’s an issue rich with imagination and strange worlds.

What kid on the cusp of becoming an adult doesn’t look forward to the day when they’re able to travel past the bounds of childhood? Daniel Rosen takes that concept and, because this is Apex Magazine, adds a disconcerting and thought provoking twist. We welcome Betsy Phillips and Benjanun Sriduangkaew back to our pages. Betsy’s story feels particularly timely due to the recent 1.5 billion dollar Powerball Lottery drawing.

As for Benjanun’s story … I’m going to leave her opening sentence right here:

"As the world marches toward the guillotine of its finale, the sleeping beast shakes loose the slats of its painted unthought and licks the tang of dénouement from its fangs."

Wrapping up our fiction selections, we present a reprint of "On the Occasion of My Retirement," a novelette by Nick Mamatas receiving its digital debut inside Apex Magazine.

Our poetry this month comes courtesy of Heather Morris, Mike Jewett, Crystal Lynn Hilbert, and Laurel Dixon. Russell Dickerson interviews cover artist David Demaret. Andrea Johnson interviews Benjanun Sriduangkaew regarding her avant-garde and poetic fiction output.

Our podcast fiction this month is "Four Gardens of Fate" by Betsy Phillips.

Finally, enjoy an excerpt from Glitch Rain by Alex Livingston, the latest book from Apex Publications. Many of our regular readers will recognize Livingston for his story "Proximity" from issue 73. Glitch Rain is set in the same universe as "Proximity."

See you next month when we have Lavie Tidhar, Jason Sandford, Elizabeth Bear, and Travis Heerman.

Jason Sizemore

Editor-in-Chief

The Beast at the End of Time

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

4,000 words

As the world marches toward the guillotine of its finale, the sleeping beast shakes loose the slats of its painted unthought and licks the tang of dénouement from its fangs. It stirs upright on trembling ligaments, clad in starvation and rust.

"You are not here," a calm voice which mimics the beast’s speaks in its skull. "You died a long time ago." An existentialist voice, it thinks as it tests the strength of its sinews, the curve and length of its legs.

"You’ll understand nothing," the voice goes on. "This is not your place and you will die again, returning to sand and grass."

The beast totters and falls to its knees. The catenary of its spine warps and its mouth opens, stretching to the limit of its hinge.

It vomits. A catalogue of its regurgitation: half a meter of soft wire, seven silicone molars, one-fourth liter of fluids — acid, blood, mucus. And a single hexagonal chip, data-bright and laden with age.

The beast’s skull-voice slows and stutters, then goes silent entirely.

§

The beast sips (I sip) knowledge from the remains of the chip. Raw data remains inside its (my) mouth, on my gums like the detritus of a meal, but I haven’t eaten for a long time. Recollection (hers?) of food kicks up in spumes, tamarind paste and egg, sleek pork laid out against coils of rice noodle. Sour. Hot. My palate stings at the pinpricks of memory.

There are ports in my flanks and calves, leashed to nodes that tremble like loose teeth in the stone. Delicately, I unplug each, unmooring myself. I expected shackles; I expected resistance. Instead I step free with ease, a dry rasp of corroded jewelry falling from my shoulders, desiccated hairpins from my shorn scalp. Sockets in my ribs and shins gush one last mouthful of fluids, purging. I skim my fingers down between my breasts, along the ladder of my bones. I’m all rungs, only I lead nowhere and no one will come to climb. In this climate, there is only descent.

The horizon is distant, the sun a needlepoint in the sky’s burial shroud. Stars are absent. The remnant of my chip tells me this dissolving place is humanity’s last shelter and that I’m its last failsafe.

This piece of information snags. My voice, which until now meant to emerge, shrinks in panic. The rest of me strides on, bare-footed, under lycoris lilies that surround the chamber of my waking, rising tall and pitiless overhead. Bulbuls perch on their stamens, beaks sewn shut. The wind is thick with dust and machine appetite.

When I look down again, a lynx is circling me. Its pelt gleams pearl-gray, its eyes scintillant with live circuits. Old habit guides me to peck at the weave of its heuristics, intricate gossamer code as visible to me as the flowers and the birds, as tangible as my own feet. In this way I remember myself: what I was, what I did, what I can do. I unearth my voice from the mud of its fear; so much of me is animal froth, mindless terror unconnected to intellect. "Lead me." My words flow, liquid rather than the parched rasp I expected. Once there was a girl who loved my voice, called it silk and enamel; she’d love it still if she were alive now.

The lynx lowers its head. Turns, and obeys.

Despite everything, this is not a world in ruin. The buildings that rise before me, choking the streets like a vise: all new, new. Freshly made windowpanes, umbels of roofs just blossomed and glossy, houses just hatched and eggshell-smooth. The ever-renewing city, its face always novel. I begin to see the shape of the disaster, how it had gone wrong.

Strange that no one roused me when armageddon was still gestating rather than sprung. No one woke me when it had grown to adolescence. Now it is fully fledged and I have risen too late.

The lynx halts before an arch of quicksand, points its muzzle to the bronze-wheeled path beyond.

The path runs straight and determined, unmarred by fork or intersection. By next week this corridor will be something else: an empty room in an empty house, an auditorium lined with ivory seats, a stage with shifting heat-tiles for dancers who will never arrive. Where the path stops a woman is waiting for me, encased in body armor like surface tension. Her gaze moves against me like a knife against rags. "You’re the beast. The architect, Nabaat."

"I’m a stopper for the bottle of apocalypse, but I fear the glass has already broken."

"Cracked. Not broken. Come with me, if you’re really who you seem to be."

She brings me to a pomegranate hall: pillars of white pith housing red seeds and clad in tatters of golden rind. Some dozen people look up and become still. On the walls heads are mounted, horned and antlered; it takes a moment to see past the stylization, the demon-paint and tusks, the impossibly wide mouths. "When was it," I say aloud, "that you began to call me a beast?"

"When the end began and you didn’t wake; when it gobbled its way to maturity and still you lay, despite your promises. After that your name became a curse." She holds up her hand, gesturing for calm at her people. "Your life and the pledges you made were before my time, but some of us are very bitter."

Their faces resolve in degrees — it takes me time to reacclimatize to this sudden human contact. Most are of that indeterminable age, between prime adulthood and withering. One or two children. There’s nobody I know and they are all dressed to evacuate at a moment’s notice, their belongings lashed to them like messy exoskeletons. Few look well fed. "I’m here now. Give me something to eat."

She might have chastised me for so brazen a demand, but she must recognize that even I require food. From an adult — a man I think, though it can be hard to tell — she liberates a nutrient tube. Tasteless, but against the memory of life and full bursting fruits it’s even more so, like graveside offerings — all melted wax and incense smoke. As I lick and suck the flavorless fluid, she tells me of what happened while I slept.

Her name is Enmaten. Her mothers — engineers, my contemporaries — led the first of what would be many efforts to wake me. Enmaten accompanied the third and fifth. "By the sixth," she says calmly, "I was down to one mother. By the seventh, I was an orphan. At that point even organic matter — flora, fauna — fell under raw material; your children turned one of my mothers into a bridge, the other into part of a mural. I kept visiting them but within the month they’d become something else, until I couldn’t find them anymore."

I do not and have never felt parental toward the flock. They are product, not offspring. "When I made the fabricators, I implemented very exact protocols. They shouldn’t have been able to defy those."

Enmaten smiles with a pale, thin mouth nearly the color of her skin. Aged ivory, lightly gilded. "You don’t believe in evolving heuristics?"

"They are built to be competitive, to some extent, but no. The sentient AI is an ancient fantasy for the romantic mind. There was a limit: if-else arrays, however complex, remain just those." I glance over my shoulder at the masks that represent my face. "You said there were efforts to rouse me."

"Oh yes, people journeyed far and wide to see you. Before it all went wrong they built a temple around you, canonized you as a saint in several religions, the deity-in-flesh who gave us the future. You ended scarcity, made desert-ruins habitable, turned waste to gold. Your fabricators allowed for beauty. And on top of that you suspended yourself so you’d always be there to fix everything. Who could not love you, not braid your casket with rare orchids and dream of lying at your feet like tame housecats?"

The lynx has put its head in my lap. Absently I stroke it, the ruff of its neck pashmina to the sandpaper of my palm. "What prevented them from waking me?"

That edge of gaze again, scalpel priming for vivisection. "The suspension system never unlocked and there was no way to extract you from it without the risk of killing you. One of your lovers, it was said, tried to kiss you through the glass — kept trying right up until the fabricators made a marble pillar of her. I’m sure her bones are still out there somewhere, incorporated into a roof or street. Or scattered between a thousand houses. Like dust, like pearls spilled from a necklace."

Pearls and dust are nothing alike, I want to point out. "I don’t know whom you might mean," I say not to sound callous, but because I genuinely can’t remember. I haven’t had so many lovers and of those I can recall none would be so devoted. "It should have been simple to wake me. The moment the fabricators started malfunctioning, I should have been alerted." Jolted from my dreams of negative space, my dreams of submersive heat where my skin is glass, my lungs and stomach planet-core blaze. Where I arise from magma, first of all things, preceding humankind.

Her eyes are feverish, though the rest of her face betrays nothing. "What are you going to do about it?"

Her people’s gazes mimic hers, the gazes of famished beasts ready to sink teeth into soft meat. I may be humanity’s final failsafe, but I’m also the architect of its demise.

"My flocks and my sleep have been tampered with," I say and the mouths of the masks move with me, silent chorus. "I know who did so. I’ll find them and bring them to heel."

§

The road snakes along the city’s seams, though by tomorrow there will be neither road nor city; Enmaten tells me that the world lives nomadic now. Those last few sites of production are jealously guarded and isolated, but she says they don’t have long before they too are overtaken. "A generation or two, at most," she says, laughing like it’s a particularly fine joke. "It’s why I never got around to having children."

I lead as though I know precise directions — and I do, I remember the shape of things. The identity of my opponent abides in the seedbed of my throat, roots writhing, for the right time and the correct amount of light. Until then I’m a harvest in waiting, a series of partitions to which I as yet lack the command.

They watch my every move for that moment of uncertainty, for a step that falters. Enmaten herself sleeps at my back, one arm slung over my waist like a possessive bride, though it has nothing to do with desire or tenderness. She’d whisper of the woman who tried to wake me with a kiss: her eyes the brilliant black of an event horizon, her voice a mezzo-soprano. "And her name?" I ask one evening.

The first time she says, "That you will have to earn." The second time she answers, "You are not worthy of it."

The third time she says, "When the ships left, they brought your flocks with them to terraform."

I do not ask if any has returned or when they were last heard from. She does not name those who follow her and nor do they introduce themselves. In this way they recede from my awareness, existence distilling down to Enmaten and Nabaat, Nabaat and Enmaten.

When I sink into my implants I can track the fabricators, cluster by cluster, their cognitive arrays like star-sear. Access to modify and redirect remains out of my reach. Not denied: rather that the part of me which knows how to pluck and pull their strings is missing, detached like a lost tooth or misplaced like an old coin — the part of me I’ve come to think of as it, the beast. In spite of that the fabricators chart my path, the patterns of their migration as clear as vectors. I could reach my destination with eyes shut: the flock would never harm me — that much can’t be pried from the core of their code.

But I have more with me than my scattered self. An entourage still nameless, and Enmaten who watches me with the glittering eyes of a hungry ghost.

Navigating around the clusters lets us keep to the most stable patches, where a house might stand for as long as a month before it’s refashioned into clock towers and life-size statues. We take shelter in a forest of jewelry, boxy trunks spreading human arms. All shapes: biceps thick or thin, wrists scarred or smooth, hands wide or tapered. From them dangle chains, bracelets, torques with gemstones the size of heads. Even the earth is lustrous cabochon. I can almost remember it — my fabricators can recompose raw material into nearly anything and I must have commissioned an artisan for templates, for fancies, to absorb into the flock’s library. I might have even meant it as a gift for the woman whom Enmaten refuses to name.

Strange there’s such a void; strange my dreams are empty of family, colleagues, spouses. On so blank a canvas, Enmaten could have painted anything and I’d be none the wiser. Is painting it already, with this woman who may or may not have existed.

The forest stretches on (the beast knows where it ends; it does not tell me). We spend nights under lattice earrings the size of chandeliers, canopies of linked anklets and circlets sized for titans. My certainty grows stronger as we go, yoking me to its muscled stride, its inexorable might. Without meaning to I set the pace. When I’ve shortened my sleep from six hours to three a night, Enmaten takes me aside to tell me that her people can’t keep up. "I can’t slow down," I try to explain. "Do you see? There’s a time limit. What awaits us won’t be there forever."

She does not see. Instead she gives her people a maze-map of stable sites that I didn’t realize she has been drawing up all this time, and comes to me saying, "I can keep up with you."

So we march, lynx-shadowed, the sighs of wind making blank verse against jewelry accompanying us. This far in the trunks begin to show, like the pomegranate hall, images of me: my sleeping face etched in gold, a silver nose and copper cheekbones. In others my eyes are masked behind strips of brass, my mouth open wide to swallow entropy. Each looks like a parasite fruit feeding off the filigreed trunk.

On the third night after we have parted with her people and I at last submit to fatigue, she encircles me with her armored body and a glimpse — at last — of the gun I always knew she would have. Enmaten murmurs, "You said you know who did this."

Under the shivering platinum shadows, the topaz and emerald drops like rain, I smile. "That you will have to earn."

"This isn’t a game."

"Are you worthy of it?"

Her fingers twitch: I see it now, the callus at the base of the thumb, the way epidermis hardens to the gun’s trigger as the mind hardens to the kill. "This is a matter of survival."

"Humanity carries its own destruction," I say, though the words are not quite my own, "within the womb of its animus. That is how we are made, embedded into the road of our axons, inscribed like cipher into the myelin sheath. All of this was inevitable."

"Then why bother? Why did you suspend yourself, pledge to return?"

My head cants this way and that as though too ripe for the stem of my neck. "We’re creatures of narrative and structure. A path that begins must of necessity end. Like anyone else, I crave closure and knew I wouldn’t get it within my lifetime."

The forest thins, rounding out to a gentle slope so the transition between jewelry ground and pelt prairie seems almost natural. Sheaves of skin and fur, the coat of every conceivable animal: the red spotted flanks of deer in summer, the black of panthers sleek with health, the brindle white of seal pups. They rustle gently against our calves and hips, and in the thick of them my (our?) lynx blends camouflaged, moving predator-sure among its own kind.

In the distance, collared by a ring of shivering rabbit pelts, is a prison.

Unlike everything else in this refashioned world, it is not new; the corrugated shell is overrun by heat and scourged by time, crowned in its own rot. Like the chamber of my waking, it has never been renewed, never touched by the offspring of my imagination. This is original. This has always stood, somehow, not as old as my suspension but nearly its contemporary. As my person and my sleep, the flocks hold this place sacrosanct.

This is the home of my enemy. The one I will fight, and vanquish, and through that defeat redeem this fallen earth.

Enmaten precedes me, gun out. The weapon nests in her hand shadow-drinking, its industrial edges pure with purpose. I’ve always wished the human creature could be like that, built and honed to a single focus, ennobled by it.

The doors have long collapsed, leaning against equally dilapidated partitions. There are no bars but there are indentations in the walls: when I hold my wrists to them, they fit exactly as though this was tailored for my capture. On the ceiling women pray in high relief and their faces do not belong to me: the chin is too sharp, the nose too high, the mouth like a seam. Her gaze is lidded, lacquered black as a bride’s teeth, but there is an attitude of accusation — or judgment — in the angle of her chin, the bend of her flat pressed hands. It is as though I have crossed an invisible line that divides country from country, and not into a friendly neighbor but into that of an enemy locked in war against mine. All is hostile, even the dust crowding the corner, the decay breathing down our necks. The lynx noses along the ground, sniffing at debris.

My tongue darts out, tasting the air. It is inert. There’s no machine here, nano or otherwise, my fabricators or simple engines. No thrum of generators, no murmur of electromagnetic impulse. "There’s no one here."

Enmaten does not object that perhaps we ought to search every room first, turn up every floor tile and move aside every shard of architecture. "Perhaps she fled knowing Nabaat approaches and heralds her conquest," she says, her voice tuned to the music of mockery. "Perhaps she couldn’t bear the weight of your footsteps, the sound of her imminent loss."

"That can’t be." I press my wrist, again, to the curve in the wall that seems built just for me. If I engage it with my body entire I may well find that my frame fits too, exactly right. Cradling me as close as my skin cradles my bones. "My flock told me who and where she was. It’s not as though machines have much room for ambiguity."

"They don’t," Enmaten agrees and puts the muzzle of her gun to my temple.

The corporality of it seems almost preternatural, the chill of it nearly arctic. No weapon has ever felt so hyperreal, but then no other has ever been pointed at me so close, digging into my scalp like a lover’s fingers rigid in passion.

"When did you realize?" the beast says through my mouth.

"I carry the name of the mother who bore me. The name you never did earn. She believed in you; her wife — my other mother — did not. Both were engineers but Enmaten was blinded by sentiment, unwilling to consider that someone like you would never have created fabricators so prone to error, let alone one of this magnitude. The notion of nanobots gone amok, replicating and recreating mindlessly, because its coders didn’t limit and check it — that isn’t reality, it’s cheap entertainment. You were better than that, so was everyone working with you, like my mothers." Her expression does not change as she kicks my feet out from under me.

I lack the strength to resist and the beast provides no surge of counterforce; it allows me — us — to collapse. It does little to defend us from a blow to our side that empties our lungs of wind, leaves us gasping and curled like a salted snail.

"Another possibility," she goes on, "had to exist. A hidden section of protocols, set to activate after certain conditions were met. So secretive none of those who helped midwife the project could detect it, so buried as to be invisible to my mothers. The same protocols regulated your sleep. You never woke up because you didn’t want to; you were waiting for the fabricators to complete their work."

"This isn’t a story," the beast says softly, its voice like wind through picked bones. "Destroying the monster does not murder also its offspring. I’m not the cortex that feeds the flock its thoughts, the heart that gives it animation. With or without me, they will continue."

"Nothing is a story." And here her mouth bends, her jaw clicks, as though nursing an old hurt. That her mother wasn’t a story, gone unnarrated and without meaning. That she isn’t a story, for all that she’s trying to tell herself. "But when you die I’ll rake through your corpse, crack open your skull like a fruit. There, or in your spine, I’ll find a neural chip where your secrets reside. Decryption is its own dénouement, perhaps the definition."

With my lips the beast grins, and there must be a glint to it — alien and revolting — that makes her take a step back. "You share my love of finales."

"Is that why you did it?"

"To see a world fashioned to a single purpose. To see the ending when all else has been stripped. To be the last thinking creature alive. Yes." It touches its flanks (mine) to check for damage, locate bruise or rib-crack. "Enmaten might have mentioned it, my dreams of emptiness, of a world made pure by absence. She didn’t see the appeal, but truly I did love her."

Were she her function alone she would already have pulled the trigger. Instead that driving curiosity slows and blunts her, makes her bitterly ask, "You couldn’t have waited longer? Sleep enough and you would have woken up to a planet denuded and vacated. Heat death would have come. Or humanity would have extinguished itself, you were already convinced it’s written into us."

"I am. But I was never patient." Pulled into reluctant unity we both gaze overhead, to the praying women, to the praying Enmaten we left behind who tried to kiss us awake. Enmaten, whom the flock has preserved in image. "Not then. Not now."

A lynx leaps; a gun fires. A story ends.

§

The prairie is motionless, furs and pelts flattened as those of animals lying in wait. For prey, or else for hunters to pass.

From the prison’s gate a lone woman emerges, accompanied by a pearlescent lynx. Both move with the certainty of belonging, predators paired, dressed in muscle and warm with the sweet hunger of monsters.

Blood stains the lynx’s jaw. She bends to wipe at it until her hands are as slick as its mouth. With crimson fingers she traces characters, spelling out a name. "Enmaten," she says, putting her thumb to the lynx’s ear, a full stop to the uneven calligraphy. "It’s an inherited name, wealthy with two generations. Someone should carry it on. You will do. Shall I teach you to speak, one day?"

It tosses its head, indifferent and incurious, serene in its animal completeness. Nabaat draws to her feet, casting out the net of her mind. The flocks ignite the fabric of her thought, embroidering it like the light of distant suns, the light of ships that left seeking other stars.

The prairie parts. The architect steps through, in search of the best spot from which to watch the world end.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com,Â Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld,Â and year's bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novellaÂ Scale-BrightÂ has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

Interview with Author Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Andrea Johnson

I first read Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s short fiction in a Clockwork Phoenix anthology, and it was love at first read. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was reading something new, a fresh writing style that no one else was doing. Although peppered with futuristic sounding words, reading "The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly" it was like getting immersed in the smell and memories of my favorite comfort foods. Unapologetic and avant-garde, her writing blends lustrous beauty and edgy technology, in environs that can be dreamlike, militant, and intimate; and often all of them at the same time. It’s happened a few times now, that I’ve thought about purchasing an anthology, and only decided to buy the book because her name was in the table of contents. If you’ve enjoyed novels from N.K. Jemisin or Kameron Hurley, Benjanun Sriduangkaew is right up your alley.

You can see where it all started with her intensely imaginative "Courtship in the Country of Machine-Gods" that was published at The Future Fire (and can also be found in The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 3) and would garner her a 2014 Campbell nomination. Since "Courtship" debuted, her work has been featured at Expanded Horizons, GigaNotaSaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Mythic Delirium, Tor.com, and in the Clockwork Phoenix, Steampunk World, Meeting Infinity, Phantasm Japan, and She Walks in Shadows anthologies, among many others. Her novella Scale-Bright, the final chapter in her series of mythology retellings, was nominated for a BSFA award. I highly recommend Niall Alexander’s columns at Tor.com about Scale-Bright and the associated stories.

If this issue of Apex Magazine is your first experience with Sriduangkaew’s writing, you’re in for a treat with "The Beast at the End of Time." At first, the story felt a little like Valente’s "Silently and Very Fast," albeit written in a very different key signature. Nabaat wakes up in a world that should be thriving, if her instructions had been followed to the letter. But this world is dying — programs haven’t been followed, requests weren’t answered, something went horribly wrong and the world’s denizens began sacrificing themselves in an attempt to find a solution. But now that Nabaat is awake, she can fix everything, right? Because fixing the broken things is her job, that’s the reason she’s awake, right? Depends on your definition of the word "fix." Benjanun was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the genesis of the story, tricky POV switches, her writing style, and other short fiction authors she recommends.

Apex Magazine: Early in "The Beast at the end of Time," you use a smart method to change the narrative from third person POV to first person. Why not present the entire story in either 3rd or 1st? Why the decision to switch POVs at certain points?

Benjanun Sriduangkaew: I love experimenting with points of view — I’ve written a story that was partly in second person and partly in third, and I like to joke that someday I’ll do one that does all three. Here in particular I think the switch helps illustrate Nabaat’s success in compartmentalizing herself, in creating a second self. Some distance is required and, in text, that move back and forth between third to first person feels to me like a natural choice.

AM: The story is ultimately about Nabaat, but I was completely fascinated by Enmaten and what her family went through. Can you tell us a little about the creation and genesis of these characters?

BS: I was slightly tempted to give Enmaten her own viewpoint, but felt that’d make the story too long for the short story format. Needless to say she’s led a demanding life (as has Nabaat, to be fair, but they have responded to harshness differently). Enmaten’s motive is partly to avenge her family, partly to heal the world as best she can, and most of all to survive. In those ways she’s the opposite of Nabaat. I also ended up unconsciously writing this story as a take on Beauty and the Beast; despite Nabaat’s nickname, both she and Enmaten variously fulfill both the roles of Beauty and Beast respectively, at different points.

AM: Nabaat wakes up to a world whose coding has eroded over so many iterations. Perhaps eroding is the wrong term, but something in the code changed, and it’s caused unexpected and irreversible consequences that become tragic for the world’s remaining denizens. Many of your science fiction stories include references to computer coding, futuristic technology, the melding of people and machine, and the like. Is there any particular research that you’ve done (or real world experiences) to develop the technological terminologies you employ in your writing?

BS: I’ve done my share of dabbling, and the interaction between tech and everyday life has been a longtime interest for me. We trust the tech we use easily but their origins are sometimes unsavory (created for use in war, for example) or part of malicious/oppressive systems. We shy away from understanding these tools at our own peril, so to speak.

AM: Many of your stories feature two (or more) characters who often come from different backgrounds but realize they have a common goal. "The Beast at the End of Time" goes in a different direction entirely, with Nabaat having a very different goal than those around her, and I happily admit the end of the story was a surprise for me. Why does Nabaat want this particular ending?

BS: She is a nihilist who believes that humanity is destined to end. I expect — though I haven’t built up extensive background for her — that she’s lived a less-than-easy life; before she went into suspension, she’d achieved considerable fame and power but it didn’t change her outlook that humankind is essentially unfixable. When hope is lost, all that remains is a finale and because (like most people) she’s narrative-minded, she wants an ending that is beautiful and total. Nabaat in particular is a character I intentionally wrote as having a role that’s usually not given to female characters, a genius and unapologetic in her monstrosity.

AM: I first discovered your work in one of Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix anthologies. "The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly" brimmed with pearlescent metaphors, unearthly technology, and emotive characters that were a hybrid of animal, insect, and metal, feeling like the most perfect blend of science fiction, fantasy, and engineering. After that, I was constantly on the lookout for more of your work, being rewarded time and time again with gorgeous prose, sentient spaceships, reinvented mythologies, and character's journeys that spoke to me. I'm often recommending your work to others, yet I struggle to describe your style. So I put the question to you: For readers new to your work, how would you describe your writing style?

BS: Ha — this is a difficult one! I’ve written a fairly big range, I think, of subjects and themes but I often come back to memory, identity, power. I want to say my writing is ruthless, though that mightn’t make a lot of sense to new readers. Maybe I can say that my style is intense?

AM: I’ve enjoyed so many of your short stories and novellas over the years, do you have any plans to write a full length novel, or do more books similar to Scale-Bright that bring together a number of connected short stories?

BS: I’m absolutely doing more novellas! It’s a very natural length for me, and a superbly attractive format. Not too long, not too short, room enough to develop and flesh things out but still a form that allows for a lot of experimentation (versus a novel, which tends to ‘have’ to be commercial). What I have got in mind right now would be entirely new things rather than bringing together short stories. (I dream of completing and publishing a novella every year, but it turns out writing longer-form is a bigger challenge than I thought! Scale-Bright went by really fast — it took me a couple months, not counting edits and revisions — but that was an exception.)

AM: What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain more popularity in the next few years?

BS: Hm, that’s hard to say, but I’d love to see more writing that’s unconventional. Think Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique or Kuzhali Manickavel’s fiction. Not a trend, but I’d still like to see more of: #ownvoices. That is to say, greater representation in fiction by authors from those backgrounds (writers of color writing characters of color, and so on).

AM: As a writer of short fiction, I’m sure you read a lot of short fiction as well. What authors (of short or long form fiction) do you recommend?

BS: For novels, my recommendations are Helen Oyeyemi, Nina Allan, and Chimamanda Adichie; for short fiction, Vajra Chandrasekera, Pear Nuallak, and Rahul Kanakia have published fiction in 2015 that really worked for me. They are all different writers, with vastly varied styles, but they have in common a willingness and strength to challenge, subvert, and create work that repudiates hegemonic pressure. (I also enjoy Chandrasekera’s and Allan’s criticism; they are both passionate, incisive readers.)

Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. If she’s not walking around her day job with a coffee mug in hand, then she’s at home with a book in one hand and a craft beer in the other. She can be found online at her book review blog Little Red Reviewer and on Twitter, where her handle is @redhead5318. You wouldn’t know it from this bio, but Andrea is a very goofy person.

Anabaptist

Daniel Rosen

4,500 words

Men wear hats outside. Black for the winter, brown for the summer. Hat brims are three inches wide. Once a man marries, he grows a beard but shaves his upper lip. Unmarried boys must be clean-shaven. When a man’s wife dies, he will not remarry, no matter how lonely. This is God’s Will.

Every morning, when the sun still rose, Jakob and I woke early, before the harsh blues of the day began to spread across our sprawling pastures, ours after the passing of Mother and Father and Elsie. This too, was God’s Will. We went out to the barns and poured measured buckets of grain mash for the dairy and spread grit in the compost for the laying hens. We ran hands through our sweaty hair and squinted under the wide brims of our hats and wondered where babies came from and which of us would grow the bigger beard.

Once we got started, my brother and I talked for hours on end. We talked about what heaven was like. We wondered what life was like outside of New Lancaster. We talked about the best way to button suspenders — for some reason Jakob just couldn’t see that one strap running over the right shoulder was superior. We argued over the best way to milk and who was the better singer of hymns, but we never questioned where the light came from, until we lost it.

It was cold that morning, on the day that the sun didn’t rise. Jakob noticed it faster than I did, pointing out our foggy breath.

"What do you think it means?" he asked.

I shrugged, filling a bucket with grain. "We should ask Bishop Yoder. He’ll know."

After we finished the morning’s chores, we hitched up the buggy and rode out to Bishop Yoder’s house. The Bishop’d led me through my baptism and when Jakob was old enough he’d raise my brother up too, declare him a man and a faithful member of the church.

Bishop Yoder’s house had the same white-washed siding and solar panels as the rest of the houses in New Lancaster, but the inside was all warm brown and yellow and he gave us each a plate of snitz pie while we waited for him to tell us why the sun hadn’t yet risen.

"God’s Will," he said.

"But why so sudden?" My brother had no patience.

"Gelassenheit, Jakob. I don’t know." He shrugged and sighed. "Have either of you ever been outside the county?"

I shook my head. So did Jakob, a moment later.

"Good." He tugged at his beard. "You know that leaving New Lancaster is grounds for excommunication. Only a young man who hasn’t yet joined the church can do such a thing." He looked pointedly at Jakob. "It’s not my place to guide men of age who haven’t joined the church, though, so I’ll say no more on the matter."

Jakob nodded slowly. I looked back and forth between the two of them.

"I’ll go," I said.

They both turned to stare at me.

"It is forbidden, Ephraim. You will not go."

"But I’m the eldest."

The old man shook his head. "It is forbidden."

§

My brother left in what would have been the afternoon. I sent him off with a backpack full of pickled vegetables and a few pork chops. He’d make do. I knew he would. We hadn’t said much when we’d got back from Bishop Yoder’s, no more questions about the absent sun — I still thought I ought to be the one to go, and Jakob knew it, but I wasn’t going to go against God’s Will.

So, for the first night in seventeen years, I ate alone. I cleaned the dishes alone. I said my evening prayers alone, kneeling at the side of my bed with my head bowed. It was strange to hear my voice alone in prayer, without my baby brother’s chorus.

The next day, I woke in darkness, broke my fast in darkness, and watered the livestock in darkness. The cows seemed spooked by the long night, but the chickens pecked blindly at grit and mash with their usual fervor. I wondered if the livestock could live without sunlight.

I wondered if I could.

Two days later, the sun rose, and I felt something inside me slowly crumble, some tangle of worry and fear. I smiled, and set about my chores. Jakob would be home soon.

Three days after the rising of the sun, I did our chores alone.

On the fourth day, I felt the knot tightening back upon itself

On the fifth, I hitched Susie to the buggy. She laid her ears flat and stared into my eyes. I thought maybe she missed Jakob, too.

Riding to Bishop Yoder’s house took longer than it had with Jakob. My brother was always in a rush, and even though I was the eldest, it seemed I was destined to be dragged along in his wake. There was the time when Jakob woke me in the middle of the night and we took out the buggy and raced along the empty paths of New Lancaster until sunrise. The scars on my knuckles made it hard to forget.

I arrived just as the sun began to set. Just like last time, it seemed as if the bishop was waiting for me. He sat on the front porch with a glass of milk, a lantern burning above him, illuminating the aged wood in flickering shadows. He’d always known, it seemed, when Jakob or I were coming.

I expected excommunication when I confessed my plan. I expected to be disowned. Instead Bishop Yoder closed his eyes, and opened them, and asked, "Can you bring him back?" We sat together on the porch, wrapped in blankets, though it wasn’t as cold as it had been during the long night.

"You could stay," he said. "Let him live with the choice he’s made. He’s his own man."

"I could stay," I said, meaning I cannot.

"I’ve already lost one son. Don’t make it two."

"The greatest loss in life is what dies inside us while we live."

Bishop Yoder smiled ruefully. "I suppose I deserve a taste of my own medicine." The smile faded. "What if he doesn’t want to come back? Will you drag him home, gagged and bound?"

He turned away from me as I stood to leave, his face dry. He had always been a strong man.

§

I packed a bag: three sets of trousers and suspenders, two white shirts. Then I emptied the bag and replaced it with a fifty foot length of rope and two pounds dried beef. This too, I emptied, and refilled with a collection of small knives Jakob and I had made together, as well as my battered copy of Es Nei Teshtament. What do you take with you when you leave home?

The answer, I supposed, was nothing. It’s not really leaving if you take home with you when you go. After one more day of chores, after I’d fed Susie and the dairy cows and the chickens and said my goodbyes, I followed Jakob’s path, empty-handed. I passed by white-washed houses, neat picket fences, and bearded men tending gardens in silence. They looked up as I walked by, but said nothing.

By nightfall, I was further from home than I’d ever been.

It was a stretch to say there was a road leading out of New Lancaster, or a path, or even a trail. There was a way, though. There was a certain sequence of houses to be passed, and a certain curve to the hills. The farther away I found myself, the more I noticed the small changes. Fences disappeared. Instead of cows, there were sheep. Then goats. Then no livestock at all, at least none that I could see, just empty pastures. Houses I passed began to sport strange eaves and splashes of color on the doors and porch posts.

My stomach had been groaning for some time before I resolved to stop at the next house and ask if the inhabitants might allow me to sleep in their barn for the night. I didn’t mind traveling at night, and I was well accquainted with hunger, but I missed the company. I’d been missing it since Jakob left. My brother had stood by my side since we’d sucked at our thumbs and stolen tastes of father’s wine. It felt like part of me had left with Jakob, to unravel the mystery of the missing sun.

I wondered if he’d stop for the night, if our positions had been reversed. If he’d knock at some stranger’s door, late in the evening, begging alms. If it had been me who left instead of my baby brother. If I hadn’t listened to the bishop and stayed quietly at home.

§

The house I chose was low and squat, and unadorned save for a small grove of pink blossomed trees that stood in front of the porch. It was less colorful than the other houses I’d passed, and smaller. More like home.

On the porch was a wooden swing, and sprawled along it was a young woman dressed in brown. Her black hair poked out of every corner of her bonnet with a curious insistency, as if each hair were somehow determined to be free from its cloth prison. She wasn’t a pretty girl — she had a long birthmark that ran down the side of her neck, and her forehead was dotted here and there with pimples. Still, I bowed low and asked her as politely as possible if I could stay the night.

She smiled.

Inside, the house was littered with broken crockery. Shards of clay and ceramic lay strewn about the kitchen, the dining room, and on into the den. They covered tables and chests and chairs and shelves.

"Can I get you anything? Some milk? Pickles?"

At the kitchen table, she cleared away piles of paper and fragmented stoneware. From a cupboard, she pulled two blue mugs, curiously unbattered. Mine was wound about with tendrils of shimmering gold, as if the Creator had taken broken pieces from around the house and rendered it whole again, illuminated in glittering spirit.

"It’s kintsugi," she said, reading the impoliteness of my stare and anticipating my question.

"Do you … break these?"

She laughed, a curiously raspy chuckle. "I mend them. I take broken things and learn them and then make them more beautiful than they were before. Kintsugi."

I traced the lines of gold along the mug. They grasped outward like roots, stretching out from a single point where the handle met the cup. Then I set it down and looked out at the debris strewn around the house.

"What about all this?" I gestured around us.

She sighed as she arranged a plate of pickles, cheeses, and preserves. "Sometimes the broken pieces don’t fit back in perfectly. Or I’m missing too much of the original."

"Couldn’t you just make something new?" The gathering of refuse and disorder here was, I suspected, against God’s Will.

"Kintsugi is about acceptance. There is beauty even in imperfection."

"My name is Ephraim." To change the subject is rude, but to argue with a host in their own house … not even Jakob would be so bold.

She narrowed her eyes. "Johanna."

"A pleasure to make your acquaintance."

§

On our third or fourth mug of milk, I began to acclimate to the debris around the house. Johanna was right. It was comforting, in a way, as if the breaking of order drew tension from the air, holding strict rules at bay through the breaking of things. We spoke about many things: she explained to me the philosophies behind kintsugi, the constant striving and acceptance inherent in paradise. I asked her if she’d seen Jakob, but she had not. She was curious about how we milked in New Lancaster, and I had many questions about her own community. Most of our time was spent discussing the sun.

She laughed when I told her about the long night. She said there hadn’t been a sun in six hundred years, since we left.

"Left what?" I asked her.

She just laughed more and led me upstairs. It was dark and she said she was running low on candles. Beeswax had been getting harder to come by. We crawled into the tiny bed, separated only by an old maple courtship board.

"What did we leave, Johanna?"

She said nothing for a time, and her breathing was slow and even. She might have been asleep, but then I heard her whisper.

"Home."

§

In the morning, Johanna rose early and made breakfast. I stayed in bed. Several times throughout the course of the night I had woken to my brother’s name, whispered.

Over dried apples and pancakes, she told me many things. She told me about the sun. She told me about the Journey. She told me about how our ancestors agreed to gather together the best of the communities, the most virtuous and sustainable cultures of humanity, and board a massive interstellar vessel, bound for nowhere but offering respite from the increasing oppression of ignorant neighbors. She told me she pitied me. She told me that the sun was controlled from the end of the vessel, farther along the path I walked, towards the end of the world. She told me that, in fact, Jakob had come through before me and stayed several days in bed. When I asked her why she had lied, she looked away.

I didn’t stay for supper.

§

The shifting landscape only grew stranger as I drew away from Johanna’s house. The way itself had widened, a true path now, and along the sides there stood tall iron posts, tiny spheres like tulip bulbs embedded therein. At night, they came alive like fireflies and lit the road before me, casting my journey in the clean white light of the Creator. The houses too began to change: where before I had passed by simple wooden homes, I began to pass by places where the buildings seemed to erupt out of the earth, structures of colored stone, or still more exotic materials that glittered in the light of the lying sun.

Birds sang off-key here, when they sang at all, their music atonal, irrhythmic. Flowers had begun to spring up along the edges of the path, petals shifting rapidly between vivid hues of orange and indigo. The air here was sweeter, and wilder somehow, caressing the ends of my hair, threatening to pull my hat from my head with grasping fingers. The further I traveled from New Lancaster, the less improbable Johanna’s stories seemed to me.

Was all of this God’s Will?

For the first time in my life, I began to imagine a life outside New Lancaster. Jakob, too, must have felt this. He must have tasted this air, heard these songs. He must have realized, too.

Where we come from matters less than where we’re going.

I needed to find Jakob.

§

The flowers grew thicker as I traveled, creeping farther and farther over the edges of the path until they began to brush up against my ankles and feet and I began to trod upon them and finally the path itself was swallowed up in lawless color.

I kept walking until my legs were golden with pollen. The world around me shrank into a sea of flowers. My breath came hot and heavy and a loud buzzing sounded far in the distance. A low black thundercloud hanging over the fields of flowers began to drift toward me, and the drone increased in volume until I thought I might be deafened by it.

"Get down, idiot!" yelled a flower to my right, barely audible over the chaos of the buzzing cloud. At the end of the world, everything starts to speak to you.

Then a hand reached out and grabbed my ankle, pulling my feet out from under me and spilling me down onto the fragrant bed of flora. I was face to face with a woman dressed all in prismatic camouflage. Her cheekbones were framed by thick goggles, and she wore a net around her head.

"You got a death wish, country boy?" As she shifted around, I lost track of her for a moment in the riot of color.

I opened my mouth to tell her that I did not, in fact, want to die here, but she shook her head and put her hand on my lips. She handed me a pair of goggles. "Mouth closed. And put these on."

Just then, the buzzing reached a crescendo and the sky grew black as the cloud drifted over us. I put on the goggles.

As soon as I did, my world exploded. Blues popped and crackled with a new intensity. Yellows and reds burned, flickering at the edges. Light and dark stood out in stark contrast against each other, and I saw that it was no ordinary cloud blocking out the sun, but instead a massive swarm of bees, wings thrumming in unison as they spun through the air in dizzying spirals.

The goggles revealed a beautiful wake of pollen trailing behind the cloud of bees.

Maroon, cerulean.

Fuschia, fallow.

Turquoise, teal, viridian, and violet.

Colors beyond the ken of man, colors for which there are no words — these drifted and mingled in the currents left behind, whorls of chromatic particles spinning around each other like fireflies in a twilight marsh.

Almost as soon as it had begun, the storm of buzzing color ceased.

"That was a good one, huh?" the woman said. "Constance, by the way."

I stared at the woman. She was as fair as Johanna had been dark.

"My name. Constance. What’s yours?"

"Ephraim."

She screwed up her nose and pushed the goggles up to her forehead. "Weird."

I took my own goggles off and stared at them. "What are these?"

"Chromaweaver lenses. My god," She pushed my hat off and ran her fingers through my hair. Her hands felt cool and soft against my scalp."You really are clueless."

"I’m a traveler, not an idiot." It was the first time I’d described myself thus. I took her hand away from my head. "Anyway, I’m learning."

"Learning, huh?" She lifted the goggles up. "These let you see a wider spectrum of light: ultraviolet, infrared, and a bit of microwave. I use them for my art." She spread her arms wide, encompassing the fields around us. "Pretty cool, eh?"

I shrugged. "It doesn’t seem very practical."

"Practical? What about our life on this ship seems practical to you?"

"Well, if you eat the crops that you’ve worked yourself and give the leftovers to the livesto —"

Constance pushed me down. "Enough. You hungry, country boy?"

I nodded.

"Good. Me, too."

She unhooked a satchel from around her shoulders and dug around, coming up with several soft containers of gold.

"Open wide, Ephraim."

I leaned back, and she squeezed the sticky liquid into my mouth, letting the lion’s share of it dribble down my lips and into my beard.

"Oh no. That won’t do at all," she said, and then I felt the Holy Spirit rise in me, as it had with Elsie in the night, and Constance began to lick the sweetness off my lips and then she began to kiss my neck and down to my chest and stomach until she reached the hairs of my belly and she pulled my trousers free, letting the sun graze my pale flesh and the Spirit grew in me until finally I gasped the Creator’s name and the Spirit left me.

Constance licked her lips.

"Your turn."

§

Constance lived outside amongst the flowers. She fed me dying bees and together we drank deeply of their honey. At the end of the world, she said, we could do whatever we wanted. I could live shirtless, hatless, clean-shaven. We could be married by whatever words I chose and I could give up to her the Holy Spirit that I held inside me and feel blessed emptiness whenever I wanted.

She named for me the colors I’d never seen and counted them out in kisses on my brow. She showed me the dancing steps of the bees in courtship, and the geometries they wove in the walls of their massive earthbound hives. She was lonely.

Still, I left in the morning, crossing her chromawoven fields; for the end of the world was not the end of my journey. There was so much more to learn.

I needed to talk to my brother.

§

I’d come far enough that I felt no surprise when the flower fields ended in a smooth wall of steel and synthetic polymer. The Wall stretched out to my left and right, as far as my eyes could see, rising up to meet the sky at a sharp right angle. I pushed my goggles up to my forehead. Somewhere beyond the Wall, Constance said, there was a chamber which held the controls for the ship, the controls for the sun, and, I suspected, my brother.

My skin bronzed as I paced the length and breadth of the Wall, searching for an entrance: a door, a portal, anything. I found it easily enough, right where Constance said it would be, at the border of two warring hives of bees, a swinging metal hatchway limned in blinking neon. When I stepped up to it, the door opened with a grudging hiss.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light of the chamber, a smaller room than I’d expected from Constance’s stories. There was a single chair in the center, lined all around with flickering screens. In it sat my brother.

I ran to him. Wires snaked up from the ground and wound around his legs, wrapping him in dull greys and reds and greens. He was naked, clean-shaven, his eyes caked shut with sandy yellow grime. He wore nothing on his head, and I would have wept to see him so if my body had the water to spare.

"Ephraim." A disembodied voice rang out from the flickering images around me. Jakob’s eyes remained shut. "Disconnect me from the ship."

"How?"

"The wires. First the red, then the grey. Leave the green."

I pulled my brother free of his constraints, the colored lines sliding out of this skin without much resistance, the slight popping sound of their release enough to make my gorge rise.

After I’d pulled the wires free of my brother’s sallow flesh, his eyes fluttered open.

"Thank God! I’d hoped you’d come. I feared I might be trapped: hugging the walls of the ship, crawling the vents, in the rising sun, gazing forever into the emptiness of space." Jakob began pulling out the green wires, and he laughed, tears leaking out of his crusty eyes.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"These —" he pulled up the wires, limp and empty of life. "They connect you to the ship. Your mind, I mean. There’s more to it than making the sun rise. That’s nothing. Easy. There’s a whole other world out there. A whole universe, Ephraim! There are other places that dwarf our ship. There are animals and places and people that we’ll never see, never understand. It’s so much bigger than we realized."

He dropped the wires. "The whole ship was mine from that seat, but I was powerless here. I couldn’t free myself from the machine." He stood and grasped me in a hug. His arms felt weak. "Let’s go home."

"Home?" I asked, surprised. This was the last thing I expected my brother to say. "I can’t go home."

"Nonsense. Bishop Yoder will take you back. He’s always had a soft spot for you, and we saved New Lancaster." He paused and grabbed my shoulders. "We made the sun rise, Ephraim. We’re heroes. We can marry whoever we want, our pick of the litter."

"I can’t remarry, Jakob." Elsie’s face came to mind, mixed now with Johanna and Constance, and I felt a pang of regret. "Don’t you want to stay here?"

My brother smiled for a moment, then the grin melted away, replaced by a look of incredulity.

He shook his head.

"You know why I left, Ephraim? So that I could come back. So I could go home and see everything anew, see everything differently, with fresh eyes. And people back home will see me differently, too. Going back home is the end of the journey."

I nodded slowly. "Can you make it back, do you think?"

He smiled. "Of course. We might need to make a couple stops on the way — I haven’t eaten solid food in days, but yes, we’ll make it back just fine."

"Bishop Yoder will be glad to see you."

"Ha! I can’t wait for the look on the old man’s face."

"Me, either," I said.

"Let’s go then."

"Lead the way, brother."

He did. Without a second thought, he stepped out into the bright light of the chromawoven fields, into the flowers and pollen and mass of wild scent and color, the first step back home.

I watched him for a moment before closing and barring the door. The sound of it echoed just once. Strange, that such a simple mechanism would end my journey, a single length of metal, out of all the strange things I’d seen. I’d come all this way to save Jakob, and then when I got here, I found that he wasn’t the one who needed saving. I was. It wasn’t enough to live in New Lancaster, not without Elsie. It wasn’t enough to eat with Johanna, or make love to Constance. It had never been enough. I needed more. And now I’d found it.

I watched the chair in silence for a moment, waiting, perhaps for the sound of my brother at the door. There was nothing. Either he knew I wouldn’t go, or he still didn’t know I hadn’t followed. Then I sat and began sliding the sharp ends of the wires into my wrists, my arms, my ankles, and my legs.

My vision began to blur around the edges, and when next I breathed in, I felt the air flowing over the tops of flowers, kissing the fine hairs on the legs of bees, tickling Constance, pushing and pulling Johanna on her swing, guttering the flame of Bishop Yoder’s lantern. The blinking of my eyes was day and night. When I breathed out, I felt myself rush into stygian vastness outside the ship. I knew colors that Constance never could. I coursed out over the contours of my domain and tasted the wavelengths of stars so distant that even a thousand, a hundred thousand generations from now, my people could never know their light. I knew hydrogen and helium and ionized metals. The ship filled me, and I felt tears stream down my cheeks.

My journey was far from over. The whole of the universe stretched out before me, untasted and unexplored. I was becoming something greater than myself. The ship was expanding me, teaching me the secret language of the stars, the boundless palette of the universe. This, finally, was God’s Will.

Daniel Patrick Rosen writes speculative fiction and swing music. He grew up on a tiny farm in northern Minnesota, where he learned the value of hard work and the relative softness of kittens. His work has appeared in publications like Lakeside Circus, Spark, and The Saturday Evening Post. You can find him online at http://rosen659.wix.com/avantgardens and @animalfur on Twitter.

Calabash

Mike Jewett

It breathes midnight —

the shape of her hips

is the body of a sitar

notes that thrust

notes that drone,

that wash away breath.

The shape of her hips

a hand grenade

washing her explosive

mouth, the mouth

of the winnisimmet —

flowing, chasing rabbits

Through muck and salt

and salty clams.

Fevers walk their edges

tiptoeing to a house

painted by thought.

The house takes off

His hat, erases his

red soil, beckoning.

Beckoning.

Melted wax of the sun

if the sun was Icarus

or two ovaries.

A calabash pipe sits

in a room all alone.

Mother-of-pearl inlay

adorns its stem

stem adorns her lips

she pulls hard

at smoke,

rich and thick

her lungs are smiles.

A C string resonates

inside her gourds

her white flowers

Her white smoke

Her white blood cells.

She switched

her babies over

to compassionate care

that evening, holding

Them when they went

peacefully back to

the source of everything.

Her hips a calabash.

Her hips a hand grenade.

Washing utensils —

Calabash cups, bowls,

and basins, ital lifestyle

let the moons eat

this salt, Carribbea,

stars in the sea.

We wither,

We ashes,

we new fishes

even your touch

is alive, your tongue

a conduit, insulator,

conductor.

It spills midnight

through the sky’s

panes of glass.

Trace mandarin

oranges with it —

a surfeit.

Calabashes

Calabasas

Caligula

use for cleaning rice,

carrying water,

bowls for palm wine

And yerba tea

and pennyroyal

steeping

in mason jars

steeping

with mason bees.

Mike Jewett is editor and publisher of Boston Poetry Magazine. His poetry has been compared to, among others, Andrew Wyeth, Van Gogh, Richard Brautigan, Galway Kinnell, and Dylan Thomas. When he was a wee lad he was featured on poetry.com.

By day, he is a web developer.

Little and Red

Crystal Lynn Hilbert

I bake.

For the feral women of the forest,

the wolves and bears and ancient beasts,

I bring cakes.

My basket cream-plump, jam-stuffed,

I walk the breadcrumbs,

my mother’s footprints star-spattered flour

marking a path between the trees.

Listen —

you can hear the wolf women sing.

An old song;

your grandmothers danced to this,

heavy hips swaying against an oven door.

You remember the tune,

if not the words.

(What big eyes, what big claws,

what big girls with bigger teeth.)

Men linger in my trees,

hunters, bellies taut, hands shaking —

hissing, "hey, pretty girl, hey,

come into the light,

I’ll take you home safe."

Candy shards and blood between my teeth,

barely a morsel, a mouthful,

my fingers still stained blackberry,

I smile.

I bake.

Preserves steaming, tongue-ready,

dripping from the knots of a shattered spine;

honeyed knuckles;

sugared skull;

puff pastry swallowing marrow-bones.

Thyme-scent, lemon-scent —

I am errand sent

and market bound.

I bake cakes for the feral women of the forest.

Crystal Lynn Hilbert lives in the forgotten backwaters of Western Pennsylvania and subsists mostly on old trade paperbacks and tea. A fan of things magical and mythical, her stories tend towards a peculiar blend of high magic and Eddic poetry. A monster masquerading as her sleeps at http://cl-hilbert.tumblr.com/.

The Four Gardens of Fate

Betsy Phillips

4,700 Words

When you ask most psychics why they don’t just learn the lottery numbers and play them ahead of time, they’re going to tell you that’s not how it works. You can’t just get the numbers.

Of course you can.

The real question is not whether you can get the numbers, but what happens to you when you get them.

Georgette Washington, an occasional policy player, got her numbers in 1973. Her husband had just returned from the war. They had two small children. And she felt certain that those numbers were going to be the key to her family’s happiness. They’d buy a house in a nice neighborhood with a good school. They’d put money aside for the kids to go to college. They’d have a car that didn’t need repairs they couldn’t afford. She wouldn’t have to take Mrs. Miller’s hand-me-downs and pretend to be grateful.

Put yourself in her position. Sitting there at your tiny Formica kitchen table, a pencil in your left hand, even though you, Georgette Washington, are right-handed, and a napkin with numbers scratched on it, the numbers that came to you so forcefully you felt them pushing against the back of your eyes, pushing like they might burst your eyeballs, pushing until, bam, there were the numbers, clear as day, floating out in front of you. And you wrote them down.

Salvation. Your gift from God comes through again.

You, you’re not Georgette Washington. You’re not a young black woman living in Nashville forty years ago working as a housekeeper for a woman you pretend to like, because you’re the steady income in your family while your husband goes to school. But you can know what it’s like to want so much to have a better life, to, at least, ease your children’s way.

You can tell what those numbers meant to her.

Georgette Washington had the gift. No fucking around. The Gift. She didn’t have to con people, didn’t have to cheat. She knew the future. She watched it swirl around, at first only suggesting itself, and then, as events snapped into place, solidifying into an inevitability.

She never played those numbers. Had them in her hand, held them for ten long minutes, during which she cried like these numbers were the worst news she’d ever gotten.

You don’t dare ask her about it unless you’re in the mood to listen to an old woman laugh bitterly.

But, sure, you want to know. Why didn’t Georgette play the numbers?

Look, there wasn’t any future she could see after she and her husband won the policy in which they didn’t get cheated out of their winnings. There wasn’t an accountant they could trust or, if there was, there wasn’t a tax attorney, or if they found an accountant and a tax attorney, Mrs. Miller claimed the money was hers and Georgette had stolen it, but she’d not press charges if Georgette returned it, and Georgette had no recourse. The money went to Mrs. Miller. That is, if the numbers folks even coughed up the money which most times, they didn’t.

Or turn your sight to Martin Flood, who had it, that same real deal, The Gift. You know he grew up just outside of Chattanooga, born just a couple of years after Georgette declined to win the lottery. And he could tell a horse race just by the sound of the horses’ names. Race after race, horse after horse, win, place, show. And he only ever bet a little, didn’t want to attract too much attention.

But where is Martin Flood now? That’s right. Encased in concrete under a parking lot in Lexington, Kentucky. You’d be surprised how dangerous it can be to tell a man that none of the foals born on his farm will ever win a race. Or I guess you wouldn’t. Turns out, no matter how careful you might be, knowing the future doesn’t let you maneuver safely through it.

Which brings us to Kayla Henson, who has already had her share of bad luck. Her father was long-gone before she was born and her mother left her with Jolie Washington and her gal, April Flood, when Kayla was just four years old. Once, when April had to work third shift, Kayla went into their bedroom, patted Jolie on the arm, and said, "It’s okay. Sometimes mommies don’t come home." You have to sense that someone once comforted her with those same words.

It took some finessing, but Jolie adopted Kayla, and she and April raised her.

When Kayla turned fifteen, she got it — The Gift.

"Well, it makes sense," Jolie said. "My mother has it and your uncle, rest his soul, had it. Having it on two sides? You were bound to get at least a little bit."

"That doesn’t even make sense," Kayla objected. She’d seen what life had done to her dear grandmother and didn’t want to be treated that way. "They’re not my re —" She stopped herself before she said it. She never, ever wanted to hurt her moms like that. "We don’t share DNA."

"The Gift runs in families," April said. "And you’re in our family. It doesn’t work by science. It works because your dead folks give it to you."

"You have your blood ancestors," Jolie said. "They will always know you and watch out for you, even if you don’t know them. But, when you joined our family, you joined the whole thing. All of us, dead and alive, became your people, too. And they thought you needed this Gift."

"Oh, well, thanks, then, I guess," Kayla said.

She’d been to Lexington once a month since she was little. They’d drive up on a Saturday morning, have lunch at the McDonald’s next to the parking lot on top of Uncle Martin, and drive back home that afternoon. Georgette had sussed out that Martin hadn’t told anyone he had any family. No one knew they existed. So, they were careful to do nothing to draw attention to the fact that they knew not only that Martin was dead, but where.

After all, they also knew what the man who had killed him was capable of.

You can see why Kayla was less than thrilled with the present from her ancestors.

But the Gift is the Gift. You get it whether you want it or not and there’s simply not any giving it back. So, Kayla set out to figure out how she would foresee the future, what her method of divination was going to be.

She tried reading birds, but only saw the futures of those birds — all big skies, the crowns of trees, snug nests, and an infinite variety of deaths. Deaths from cats, deaths from dogs, deaths from immediately-remorseful kids with bb guns, deaths from larger birds, deaths from the front of semi-trucks, deaths from poison, deaths from hunters, deaths from quick hawks and silent owls.

Every story is a tragedy if you stick with it too long.

She tried reading tea leaves, but she didn’t like hot tea. If only there was some way to read sweet tea! Well, there probably is, if you ask Georgette, but Kayla couldn’t figure it out for herself and she didn’t think to ask her grandmother.

She tried Tarot cards, but she didn’t know what most of the words on the cards even meant.

"Hierophant? Is that like a pope? Am I even saying that right?"

And, though the worst card in the deck was supposed to be the Tower, she found the Devil upsetting. She didn’t like that card even being in her room. It felt like asking for trouble.

But, as Fate would have it, as she was floundering around for some way to tell the future, Georgette called out from the living room, "Kayla, darling, come play some rummy with me until Jeopardy comes on."

And there it was, in the first run Kayla put down — all clubs, five, six, seven.

"It’s a forest," she said, but her voice was dreamy. Kayla went on, "No, not a forest. What do you call it when there’s a bunch of trees on purpose?" The slight girl cocked her head and stared at the cards intently. "An orchard. That means change, and fulfillment." She looked her grandmother straight in the face, but Georgette knew Kayla wasn’t seeing her. "Georgette Washington, you are afraid of what’s coming. But don’t be. Fate tends four gardens — one living, one dead, one formal, one wild. I will walk in each garden and tell you what grows there for you."

Georgette waited for Kayla to slump over slightly. That’s how it had been for her, for many years, and she recognized the moment as it passed for the girl.

When Kayla seemed to come back to herself, Georgette threw the cards she held on the table.

"Quick, baby, what do you see?"

There they were — the Queen of Clubs, the ten and nine of Diamonds, the nine and ten of Clubs, the two of Hearts, and the three of Spades. Kayla put her hand over the cards. The trance took her back, but not so heavily.

"You have to decide, Georgette Washington," Kayla said. Her voice was scratchy, like she’d been smoking, "if you’re going to dwell among the memories of your husband or give this new man a chance."

"The Gift has made you awfully nosey." Georgette worked up a half-meant scowl. "Just tell me something straight up. Don’t play fortune teller. Just tell me the future straight up."

"You know next week’s Powerball numbers, all but the last one. And that’s fifteen." Kayla said. "Those old number are going to hit again."

"Should I play them?" But, this time, Georgette was asking her own Powers, and so Kayla stayed out of it.

And there it is, the chance for a do-over. The numbers. But this time, there’s a legal lottery to play. This time, Georgette is retired, so there’s no white woman to steal the money. This time, her daughter is an accountant.

You can’t get the winning numbers twice and refuse both times to play them. That’s just too much to ask. It goes against human nature.

But winning brings with it its own set of problems. You might turn on the evening news and catch a story about how a little old Nashville grandma won the Powerball and the camera might pan out so that you can see, just for a second, everyone who’s standing there with that grandma and you might forget to breathe when you see the tall, sandy-haired woman in the background, the spitting image of a man you had murdered a decade ago. You might, if you were Jimmy Campbell, and let’s hope you’re not.

So, there’s Jimmy Campbell, sitting in his living room just outside of Lexington, probably the only person other than the people standing there with Georgette who has any idea how it was she’d come by those numbers. And he got that guess because he recognizes poor dead Martin’s sister. Which maybe says he was haunted by what he’d done. Or says that he’s good with faces. Let’s not give him the benefit of the doubt.

Jimmy’s got it in his head that if April could pick numbers for that old woman, she could pick some numbers for him. Yeah, he picks the wrong woman, but he is right about what had happened. He figures then they’d be even — him and Martin. Now, to you and me, this doesn’t make any sense. In what world does April have any obligation to settle Martin’s debts? In what world does Martin’s death not make him square with Jimmy? In what world is Jimmy justified in punishing Martin for telling him the truth? Not in this world, but I guess in whatever world Jimmy is living in.

And here’s the other thing. It’s not like Jimmy even needs the money. He has a horse farm so beautiful it would make God jealous and an 8:45 tee time at the country club. He has enough money to pay a couple of guys he knows in Clarksville to drive down and kidnap Kayla, so he can hold her for ransom — that ransom being the lottery numbers which April would give him.

Here’s how it will happen, then. Kayla will walk home from the bus stop. One of her friends will have offered her a ride, but she’ll be pulling cards all day and it will always be the Ten of Spades she pulls for herself, which will make her feel like she’s being chased. So, she’ll want some time with just the noises of the city and the quiet in her head to try to make sense of what will be there for her in the garden Fate keeps wild.

The two men will be clever. When they find her, they will stop, and let her get about a block ahead of them. The quiet one will get out of the car and start after her on foot. She’ll be slow, lost in her thoughts, and he’ll be quick for a man his size. The driver will pull up next to Kayla, rolling down his passenger side window to "ask for directions." But see how he’ll make himself seem safe? After all, it’s going to be a big old car and he’ll be clear over on the other side of it. If she puts her hands in her pockets before she leans over to talk to him, she’ll leave nothing out for him to grab hold of.

But when she bends at the waist, the quiet one will swoop up behind her and push her right through the car window. The driver will tuck her head down and there she’ll be, stuck with her hands in her pockets, upside down on the bench seat of a car almost as old as her moms.

"I’m so fucked, I’m so fucked, I’m so fucked," she’ll say to herself. She’ll scream, but people will pretend not to notice. And later they’ll pretend they feel bad about that. Maybe some of them will.

They’ll shove her in the backseat and she’ll struggle with the doors, but she’ll be stuck. Stuck, but not stupid. What she’ll need is to somehow be where Georgette and her moms will look for her. The paths through Fate’s gardens fork, it’s true, but some trails are more obvious than others. Since she and her grandma can both see the future, all Kayla will have to do is steer events, as she can, to the future most likely to be the one Georgette will focus on.

Maybe that doesn’t make sense put that way. But, okay, think of it like this: say you have a grandmother and her favorite color is purple. I give you three balls — one green, one yellow, and one purple — and I ask you to choose which one your grandmother would choose. Don’t you pick the purple ball? Of course you do.

When Georgette sits down at the table and lets that pain crawl from the back of her skull, pierce through her brain, squeeze her eyeballs like grapes until, Pow, there’s the future in front of her eyes, three or four possibilities. She squints until one likely outcome comes into focus.

Here’s what Kayla knows about her grandmother: Georgette is resigned to a certain amount of insurmountable bullshit; she puts other people’s needs ahead of her own, even if it makes her unhappy; and she has a deep and abiding faith in Justice. Not in justice, not in bad guys getting caught and punished. She knows that doesn’t always happen. But in Justice, in Good eventually winning out.

So, Kayla is going to pull her cards and see three possible futures for herself — the Ace of Spades, which will tell her she ends up dead, alone, and undiscovered; the King of Hearts, which will be another card of desperate endings though maybe not for her; and the laughing boy, the Jack of Diamonds, which she’ll take to mean her dead uncle is watching out for her and that he might, indeed, be having the last laugh before all this is through.

She’ll throw her lot in with the memory of her uncle. She’s going to know her grandmother would, too. She’ll sit tight and wait for another moment in which augury seemed appropriate.

That won’t come until they’re clear to Lexington.

"You want some McDonald’s?" the driver will ask her, as he pulls into the parking lot. Kayla will have to fight not to smile. How many times has she eaten at this very McDonald’s? How many times has she sat facing the parking lot next door, the very parking lot her Uncle Martin lies under? Hell yes, she’ll take some McDonald’s. Of course she can count on Georgette and her moms to make their way to this spot. And, yeah, she will pull three more cards, see which path to take next.

All kings. All paths lead to the man in charge. This means that though she’ll be amazed when they drive out to Jimmy’s house, she won’t be surprised that there is, ultimately, some mastermind who bosses her kidnappers around.

"I don’t really understand America anymore," he’ll say when he sees her. "She doesn’t look like either the Flood gal or her ‘partner,’" which he’ll say with a particularly obnoxious sneer. "Doesn’t anyone stick with their own kind anymore? Now you got everyone marrying everyone else, raising kids that don’t resemble either of them." He’ll turn to her. "How do you even know who your people are? I don’t get it." It will be mostly a question he doesn’t expect her to answer.

"What do you want?" Kayla will ask, because she won’t want to have to wait until she can be alone with her cards to find out.

"I want your mom to do for me like she did for your granny. I want some lottery numbers," Jimmy will say. "I reckon they’ll trade me that to get you back."

Kayla will spend most of the evening in the dark in a closet that, but for the lack of a window, is fancier than her bedroom at home. She’ll use the little light seeping in from the outer room to read the cards again. She’ll pull the Queen of Spades — a woman wild and unexpected. Maybe that could be her. Maybe that will be her, if she tries. She’ll pull the Five of Hearts, which, in the dim light will look to her like a gift to be given. She’ll pull the King of Hearts, the man to whom she should give the gift. This powerful asshole who will have her in a closet. And why not a fourth card, to see what’s at play in all four of Fate’s gardens? There he’ll be again, the laughing Jack of Diamonds.

Kayla has only recently learned to see the future and no one in her family had ever learned to read the past. But the past is going to come to her anyway. She’ll see that Jack of Diamonds, and she’ll get it — everything I’ve told you here. How Martin had read the future of this very farm. How he had not lied to Jimmy about that future, even though, surely, he must have known what would come of it. How he died, alone and scared, and how Jimmy couldn’t even be bothered to oversee it himself. How Jimmy had just sat alone in this big old house feeling certain he had prevented the terrible calamity that would have come from everyone knowing his horses couldn’t win.

But Justice comes. Georgette isn’t wrong about that.

"I could just show you how to do it for yourself," Kayla will call out from inside the closet. Over and over. Until he bothers to come investigate the noise and to hear the offer.

"Do what?" he’ll ask, his breath will already be whiskey-tinged.

"Read the future in a deck of cards," she’ll say.

He’ll let her out of that closet and sit her in a chair in the dining room. He’ll tie one hand behind her back and both legs to the legs of the table.

"I’m going to pee myself," she’ll say, but he won’t care. He has women to clean that kind of mess up for him.

"Show me," he’ll say. He’ll sit at her right hand, crouching over the card deck, like he both wants to touch it and is afraid to.

"Shuffle. When you feel like they’ve been shuffled enough, turn the first card over."

"Ten of Clubs," he’ll announce as he flips it. He’ll look at her, like he’s waiting for her to be magic.

"To me, the Clubs are on purpose, they’re the place where Fate tries different things, just to see what will come of it. It’s the most like gardens how we have them here," she’ll explain.

"I don’t see that," Jimmy will say.

"You have to kind of look straight at it and then try and see what else is there, like what things it reminds you of. That’s where the future shows up, at least for me, when I’m just letting my brain kind of run on with itself," she’ll say.

Jimmy is going to pick up the card and study it.

"What do you see?" she’ll ask.

"A fucking card."

"Okay, but what’s also in your head?"

He’ll study it some more and then he’ll say, "I think I get it. I mean, this kind of looks like a tree-lined pasture, right?"

"Okay," she’ll say, nodding. That’s not what she’s going to see. She’ll see an orchard with something hidden in the middle, though what, she won’t yet be able to tell.

"But," and now his voice will change. It’ll kind of soften, "there’s nothing in the pasture. This beautiful place and it’s empty. Not being used for the thing it’s supposed to be used for."

Next he’s going to draw the Five of Spades. Kayla will start to explain to him what it means to her, but she’ll see on his face that he’s barely paying attention to her. He’ll hold the card out at arm’s length and then turn it up, so that it will catch the light from the enormous chandelier. He’ll draw the card closer to him and then, just as it seems like he might touch it to his nose, his face will change, his eyes will glaze over. He’ll go in some kind of trance.

He’ll sit quietly for so long Kayla will wonder if he was asleep. Then he’ll sigh.

"There’s no way," will be all he says. Who even knows what he might mean? He’ll put the card face down in front of him and it’ll seem like he’s resolving to not think any more about it.

And then the third card — the King of Hearts, sword to back of head.

When Jimmy looks up at Kayla, she’ll swear she is looking at a different man. That’s how radical the change is going to be from the blustery tough guy who arranges her kidnapping to the drawn, pale man who’s going to turn his face toward her.

You figure there’s got to be some part of a guy like Jimmy that is just a pure, raw nerve of terror. What else could drive a man to build up all this wealth? And to do it on a pile of at least one dead body? There’s got to be a part of him that’s running for his life from something.

And what that look on his face is going to tell Kayla is that he’s not going to make it. That thing is going to catch up with him at last. Without saying a word, he’s going to get up from the table and leave the room.

As soon as he’s out of sight, Kayla will kick against the ropes that are going to keep her tied to the table, trying to shake something loose. She’ll reach back and try working at the knot that will hold her hand in place. She’ll feel like it is ready to give, like it just needs a little more encouragement, but she won’t be able to get a firm hold on it. Her hands will be sweating too badly.

Jimmy’s going to come back into the room. He’ll have something in his hand, but he’ll hold it just behind his back, so she won’t be able to see what it is. His face will be flushed, though, and she’ll see his free hand shaking.

"I had this fight with your uncle a couple of times," he’ll say, when he sits back down again, next to her, in front of the cards. "Was I cursed all along and your uncle just pointed it out? Or was I fine and then he cursed me?"

"Mister," Kayla will say. She’ll try as hard as she can to not look at the red King on the table. She won’t like the things it will suggest about how the evening will go. "Mister, I have never heard of a curse being real. It’s all in your head."

"Like this?" he’ll ask and she’ll realize that what she thinks is sweat on his face are tears. "Isn’t thinking you can tell the future also some kind of con? And yet, here you are, sticking me with another terrible curse, like that’s just your family’s job, to run around and fuck me up."

"What? I didn’t curse you," she’ll say.

"You put this thing in my head," he’ll say. "You let me see the future. The IRS. The FBI. All the rest of it." He’ll drop his chin to his chest and Kayla won’t be able to tell if he’s passed out or if he’s building resolve.

"But that’s the point," she’ll say. "If you know it’s coming, you can change it. You can step aside."

"Exactly," he’ll say, in a voice so calm it will give Kayla the chills. She’ll make the mistake of glancing down at the table, and so she’s going to know, a second before he puts the gun to his temple, a second before blood and bone splatter against her, and a second before she’ll swear the bullet goes tumbling right by her head, and since she’ll know, she’ll start screaming, so loud in her own ears that the thunder of the gun will barely register.

But that won’t be the worst part. No, imagine you just watched a guy kill himself in front of you. You’re a screaming, hysterical mess. You wet your pants, you’re so scared. But you can’t get loose. So you have to sit there, next to him, his wide-open dead eyes staring at you. You call for help, but I guess the kidnappers got the evening off. You sit there so long you watch his eyes go cloudy. So long you can’t feel your feet anymore. So long in the silence that you wish you could cover your ears just to keep from having to hear that there’s nothing to hear.

How are you going to survive that?

How will she?

"I knew you’d come," she might say to her moms, as maybe they squat down next to her to untie her. "I knew you’d come." She could throw her arms around both of them.

"In here," Georgette may say to someone out in the hall. "Our baby’s in here." The police and the paramedics would, in that case, swarm into the room.

"It’s okay, darling," Georgette might say, perhaps squeezing Kayla’s one free hand, while, if she’s lucky, the cops and her moms will continue to wrestle with the knots.

If it goes this way, Kayla will be free and the paramedics will rush in to lift her up and carry her out. One of them will bump the pile of cards and send them flying.

"Careful," a police officer might bark. "We don’t have any pictures yet!"

And maybe, in one of the pictures they could get of Jimmy, you might see the Jack of Diamonds face up, right by his hamburgered head. Is that Justice or just some joke Fate will have at Jimmy’s expense, payback for trespass?

I can’t say and Kayla won’t.

Betsy Phillips’s short stories have appeared in Betwixt, Beyond Borderlands, Eurynome, and Qarrtsiluni, as well as various anthologies. She is the author of A City of Ghosts and The Wolf’s Bane. Apex Magazine was the first place to publish her, a fact she has never forgotten. Neither have her detractors. She lives in Whites Creek, Tennessee with a mean cat, a grouchy cat, and a dog who recently tried to steal a truck.

Arrhythmia

Heather Morris

I keep my heart in a box

in a cool, dry place

Just like the instructions say:

it is dark, and quiet, and safe.

They say that you should take your heart out at least twice a year.

Give it a test drive, make sure everything still ticks properly.

But I don’t.

I have my reasons.

Many people keep their hearts on display.

Boutiques sell lacquered cases

with inspirational sayings, abstract designs.

Swarovski crystals are hot this year, or plastic rhinestones if you’re cheap.

But I just use an old shoe box,

one that once held platform Mary Janes.

There are newspapers crumpled up inside —

remember when we used to read newspapers? —

from August thirteenth, 1997

(there is no real significance, but I remember the date,

though I have not checked on my heart in a long, long time).

Girls dream of elaborate unboxing ceremonies at their weddings

and boys —

well, I’ve never claimed to know what boys dream of in regards to their hearts.

But in any case, you’re supposed to keep yours close at hand

in case of accident or emergency.

I almost forgot mine once,

when I moved.

And sometimes I still wonder what the new tenant would have done

if they found my dusty shoebox,

stuck in the closet between old Christmas decorations and

my second-best space heater.

Would he (let’s call him he) have tracked me down,

sent me a brown paper package with my heart packed in bubble wrap?

Or shown up on the doorstep of my new apartment with my heart cradled in his hands?

Or would he have tossed it in the dumpster with his flattened-out boxes,

leaving me to always wonder where the silly thing had gotten to?

It is an exercise in theory

because one of the movers found my heart on his last trip to the truck,

but sometimes I still wish I’d had the courage to leave it behind me.

I wish this for myself in the space between beats,

when the silence gives me such relief.

Heather Morris is a cyborg librarian living in North Carolina. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Bards & Sages Quarterly. This is her first published poem. You can find her at thebastardtitle.wordpress.com and on Twitter @NotThatHeatherM.

Paper Unicorn

Laurel Dixon

Unicorns endure only

the brief touch of a maiden, her pure palm

free of the snarl of man’s complications —

his tangled and blood-thick love.

Innocence is often folded paper-thin,

sun-warm, delicately alive

in the wild. Stark before the backdrop

of green, the unicorn’s breath

blesses the bark of the trees

and the purple-headed chives.

Night might whisper us a different story.

Paper-cut and restless, the unicorn

staggers from its hollow of heather,

cream-colored and ready

to be bad.

To smoke at the edges, ink the tips

of its paper paws. Search for the sun

in the maidenless dark: indigo,

thick with desire.

Laurel Dixon lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She won first place in The Carnegie Center’s LGBT Writing Contest for her story "How to Fall in Love with Straight Girls," and her poetry has been published in Tobacco Magazine, Words Dance Magazine, Pollen, and The Legendary. She spends most of her time writing, gardening, and drinking too much coffee.

On the Occasion of My Retirement

Nick Mamatas

13,300 words

Thank you all — faculty and students, deans and provosts, Ms. President and our board, community members and honored guests for coming today. I suppose I’ll begin with a few prefatory remarks about the recent events in my life. My appearance here, and my mode of dress, and even my manner of speaking might seem a bit strange. I’m not exactly on the bill as it were, and yet, here I am, standing in for the man you were expecting. Let’s begin, not quite at the beginning, but with the now. With whom you see standing before you today, giving this valedictory on Dr. Ewing’s behalf. Let’s talk about Emma. Let’s talk about, and this is a word you’ll find belongs in quotes, "me."

Emma was a smart girl, so despite my better judgment, I let her see the statuette. She had walked right out of a New Yorker short story — black hair cut into a bob, cardigan, skirt ending right at the knee, Mary Janes, birdlike wrists, and blue eyes — and into my class. A solid B-minus student and an office hours regular. She was helping me pack up the office now, after two semesters of Semiotics, Semantics and Communication. After two and a half decades at Miskatonic University.

Not even the affairs had led to my dismissal despite tenure and a faculty union. Hell, it wasn’t even the statuette.

"This is amazing," Emma said. She held it one hand, palming its base like a basketball.

"What’s amazing is that you can look at it."

Emma smiled. "I have a little vantablack dress. It’s strange. I mean, I can’t see it, no more than anyone else, but you get used to the idea of holding a weird blob after a while … or being one."

"Vantablack and you never wore it for me?"

"It doesn’t work very well, you know, on dates?" Emma still had a tendency to slide back into uptalk, no matter how much I belittled her for it. Vantablack dresses cost a mint — the artificial nanoblack is used primarily for stealth drones and deep space telescopes. It’s so black it can absorb ninety-nine point something-something percent of visible light, and also microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet.

"That’s not vantablack," I said. I smiled. "That statue is supposedly one thousand years old."

Emma gasped one of her tiny gasps and put the statuette on the corner of my desk. What used to be my desk.

"What’s it doing here, then?" Emma asked.

I struck my professorial pose — arms folded across my chest, ankles crossed, butt leaned up on the corner of my desk across from where Emma had placed the statuette.

"You tell me," I told her, "and maybe I can get your grade up a bit."

"After all I’ve done for you, there should be more room for my grades to go up," she said, little fists on her hips now.

"Miskatonic has a very strict attendance policy, even for upper-division courses. Plus, on three separate occasions, I caught you looking at your smartphone in class and I cannot stand that. What can I say?" I cut my chin at the statuette. "Go on."

Emma looked at it again. Her eyes rolled right off it — once, twice and then the third time she looked off to the side, to better catch it in her peripheral vision.

"Well, it could be in a museum. But which one and in what exhibit? Nobody puts a piece on display with a card reading, ‘Unknown artifact constructed of unknown materials. Date: unknown.’ Without context, it can’t be displayed."

"Same reason it can’t really be studied. Who would want to spend their careers on a text without a taxon? So, it’s a sign that … fails.

"Naturally, it would end up in the office of a semiotics professor. It’s too interesting to throw away and too interesting to do anything with."

"Pretty close," I said. "That pretty much sums up the whole field. A solid B+ answer."

Emma blanched. "C’mon," she said. "That was pretty good."

"Yes, B+ is ‘pretty good,’ " I said. I put my arms around her waist. "You have A+ skills in other departments." I kissed her. She looked up at me and said, "It’s true. I’m also fucking Professor Diamond in Anthropology." I had no idea what to say.

Driving home, I realized what a fool I’d been. Over the years, I’d taken my share of lovers from the student body. Miskatonic is an old-fashioned school in a lot of ways and indeed, one of those ways is that it was generally understood that having the occasional affair with an undergraduate was an inevitable outgrowth of the intense mentoring dynamic in small liberal arts colleges. I was a good professor — I never initiated an affair with a frosh, never attended student parties or bought any of my lovers any alcohol, and I tried to open the minds of my lovers just a little more widely than I could during class time. I shared books with my lovers, drove into Boston for cultural events with them, and even attended concerts and films of their choice on occasion.

I never lent or gave them money, as that would lead to unnecessary complications. Money, that medium of universal exchange, never simply stands for itself but always something else. Always everything else.

In this way, money was the exact opposite of the statuette. Money meant everything, but was never itself; the statuette, which I strapped into the passenger seat of my aging Saab like it was a child in the days before the nanny state and mandatory car-seats, was always itself and could mean nothing else. Plus, I had the statue and I had no money. Opposites.

Clearly, either Emma or Professor Diamond had sold me out. Though our packing session had ended with sex, it was desultory and awkward. Emma refused to be bent over my desk, saying that the statuette "weirded" her out. Instead, she sat awkwardly in my lap and looked at the ceiling while I sat on the edge of my desk. I had been hoping to leave a wet spot, so that the department, and my faculty replacement, would have something to remember me by, but it was not to be.

In all fairness, Miskatonic did well by me. If there were a fairness beyond all fairness, I would add this additional bit of fairness: The university did not want a scandal. It had few enough African American faculty as it was. It would have been simple enough to spin my dismissal as a racist impulse, a variation on the old Mandingo myth. Call it playing the race card if you will, but the fact is that Professor Diamond still had his job and Emma’s sweet little ass, too. If you find the idea of someone being hired partially for the sake of "diversity" distasteful, imaging living in my skin and being judged as an Affirmative Action hire automatically, regardless of my teaching skill and research.

Oh, we’d love to have you in our department, Dr. Ewing, they say but not necessarily because you’re any good. Instead, we’d love to have you make us look good. Twenty years later, things were better. I proved myself a dozen times over, but in the end, I was let go anyway, betrayed by a lover. That had to have been it. Break-up sex always has a mechanical quality to it.

I got a decent severance package from Miskatonic and was named the year’s Smith Keynote Speaker. Officially, I was retiring. Officially, Emma’s GPA would remain a 3.94, even with her B-, a mere 2.70, on her transcript. The grade would appear in parenthesis and thus somehow be annihilated via the act of being highlighted.

I suppose that the true embarrassment is this — with my severance, I finally paid off the last of my own student loans, and some other debts I had accumulated to make up for the shortfalls from research grants and non-reimbursable expenses. One cannot bomb an apartment building full of sleeping Palestinians or Serbians or Iraqis with the fruits of my work, at least not directly, so funding had always been niggardly. Now I was at zero. Though that nothingness actually represented an upward climb, and an improvement in my network according to mint.com, I also had another zero to face. Zero income.

My home is more graduate student than professor. Students liked it that way — what can I say? And I never married, never felt comfortable with hiring a cleaning service. My grandmother had been a maid and she was always so tired. Her fingers looked like tree branches at the beginning of winter, gnarled and ever reaching toward something. Books were everywhere. Most of my shelves were either IKEA or cast-offs from the end-of-semester move outs. I had a flatscreen TV, but these days, everyone had one, except of course for most of my colleagues, despite all their work in media and representation. A few of my lovers had been surprised to see the TV hanging on the wall and a shelf stuffed with DVDs — a complete collection of Wrestlemanias, Mexican and Korean horror films, and some of the war documentaries I screened in class.

People like a professor with a television. It humanizes us. More than once, a girlfriend let me know that she, like the professors she admired, never ever watched television, only to sit down in front of it and fall into a teletrance. Poor Emma, in the early days of our relationship, cringed as she watched Monday Night Raw, one hand on my cock and the other working her pussy. "The only way I can watch this violence, Gordon," she had told me, "is by pretending that this is all fake." Triple H was working over someone with a sledgehammer.

"I’ve got some good news for you, then," I told her. Then I brought her close to me and ejaculated onto her blouse. Later, I explained that wrestling was a series of choreographed exhibitions.

The TV screen was black but not so black as the statuette. Nothing was, really, not even the blacker-than-black vantablack scientists had so recently discovered. It’s hard to describe how black something like the statuette was, except that I can tell you two things:

The statuette looks like, at best, an abstraction of a flame, tongues licking the air atop a crude stone base. When a cast was made of the statuette, an enormous complexity was revealed. So little light is reflected from the obsidian-like black stone from which the statuette is carved that none of the details are normally visible, but the casting showed that the tongues of flames were covered in minutely carved reliefs. Twisting vines of some sort, with ants chasing after crawling men, slicing them in half with their mandibles. Tiny limbs and severed breasts scattered and falling among the leaves.

The second thing is something I should have already known and I felt rather foolish when I figured it out. It is nearly impossible to take a useful photograph of the statuette, as it looks just like a black blob from most angles. This made it nigh impossible to try to sell on eBay, which was my immediate plan for bringing in some income. I even had an old Super-VHS camcorder with a mounted light, but digging it out of the bowels of my closet and pointing it at the statue while I used the flash setting on my smartphone didn’t help.

Were this a work of fiction rather than a memoir, I’d say that, frustrated, I went to bed and after a long period of tossing and turning with worry over my love life, career and immediate money woes, fell asleep, only to fall prey to dreams of black flame and snapping mandibles. But all I did was warm up some spaghetti, watch half a film on TCM, and then fall asleep on the couch, clothed but with my pants undone. I had no dreams worth remembering, but I did think to call Lenore in the morning, which is what I did.

Lenore was another Miskatonic student and another one of my "conquests," though we had parted amiably after a single semester. She was a work-study student with a position in the audio-visual department. As such, I presumed she had access to either equipment sufficient to take a decent photo of the statuette, or at least some idea of how to proceed. It’s a stereotype that academics are technically incompetent. I suppose I am a stereotype, but aren’t we all?

I was loath to return to campus unless I had to, but Lenore wasn’t answering either her personal cell number or the office phone. I wrapped up the statuette and drove back to campus, to find the A/V office locked, with no sign on the door, though several Post-It Notes were stuck to it. These, as far as I could tell from the nearly illegible pen, were from various faculty members annoyed-to-outraged that their video projectors, slide carousels, and microphones were behind a locked door, with no sign of when anyone might be along to help.

One of the notes was as vague as it was emphatic:

L

DAMNIT!

DIAMOND

There was Professor Diamond again, still sniffing after my sloppy seconds. I decided to head over to the Anthro department and pay him a visit.

Simon Diamond was a lazy anthropologist — his specialty was literally the sex lives of college students. He had been a young-looking twenty-something back in his grad school days, and turned his careful analysis of mating rituals in an undergraduate dorm into an interesting dissertation and then a salacious, and popular, book called Two in the Pink. The post-colon subtitle was a bit of academic flummery I can’t recall, but it did contain the words "late capitalism." Diamond is the reason Miskatonic instituted a rule that during office hours, faculty doors must remain open.

Diamond’s door was open, but he was sitting alone when I walked in. He smiled, seemingly authentically happy to see me. "Gordon! Come in!"

"Simon," I said, taking a seat. I’d not been to his office before, but Miskatonic is a small-enough school that most faculty members in the social sciences know one another. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the décor.

"So, Central African chokwe masks, and carvings from Tanzania. Did two different colleagues have two different tag sales?" That’s anthropology for you; whites appropriating the physical and performative cultures of people of color.

"I’m interested in form and physique," Diamond said.

"I bet."

"Listen, Gordon, what do you want? Are you here to spark some kind of confrontation? I’ll call the campos right now."

"Lenore …."

"Which?" he asked.

There were seven or eight Lenores on campus, it was true. Something about Miskatonic attracted slightly old-fashioned and literary names, or perhaps people with such names were attracted to the little college.

"Reichl, with the pink hair and the nose."

"Oh, is her hair still pink?"

"I don’t really keep track."

"All theory, no facts, eh?" Diamond said.

"Well, my favorite part was always shaved …" I said.

"Here’s a fact: she’s missing," Diamond said quickly. "I just found out about it myself. There was an all-campus email sent out. The other A/V kid, too, the bl —"

He couldn’t bear to finish saying the word black in front of me. He turned the computer monitor on his desk toward me and opened up his Outlook mailbox.

"Hmm," I said. "So, why did you leave her a note, specifically?"

"Why do you care?"

"This is a missing girl we’re talking about, Simon."

Diamond laughed. "You’re full of shit, Gordon. You didn’t know she was missing when you came here. What did you want with her, or with me, for that matter?"

I decided to show him the statuette, so pulled it from my satchel and placed it on his desk.

"That’s impressive. Can I touch it?" He did so without waiting for my answer, putting a finger to one of the tongues of black flame. "Huh. It feels almost fuzzy, like the tip of my finger is sinking into it."

"It’s an amazing piece. Totally unknown provenance and inexplicable meaning. Is it flame, a plant, an abstraction? Nobody knows."

Diamond looked up at me, his finger still on the statuette.

"I want to sell it on eBay to make a few extra bucks. But it’s too black, too absorbent, to get a decent photo of it. I thought Lenore might be able to help."

"Huh, interesting." Diamond didn’t really think that was interesting. The statuette, though, yes. It may well have been the most interesting thing to ever cross his desk, save for Emma’s little heart-shaped ass.

"There’s something in that A/V office I need, too …" he said, contemplative.

"Sex tape?"

He looked at me, licked his lips. "Should we try to break in?"

"Why don’t we just call the janitor and get the door open?"

"Why didn’t you do that, already?" Diamond asked.

"I don’t work here, anymore, remember?"

The door was easy enough to get open, once Diamond tracked down the right number to call and once the shambling old janitor appeared with a key ring the size of a small hula hoop. Diamond immediately started pawing through anything that looked like it might be a record of his romp with … he hadn’t told me whom. Did he get Emma into bed and Lenore behind the camera? Both at once, with a stationary shot from a tripod to capture the tangle of limbs?

I started poking around the supply closet for some umbrella lights. Diamond got out his phone and called Emma, started peppering her with questions about a camera and what it might have looked like. "Big and black, is that all you can say?" he said into the phone.

"That’s what she said," I said, with a laugh.

Diamond shot me a look, but I couldn’t help but find the whole situation humorous. I’ve never been one to suffer from a broken heart. More than anything, I was curious about the recorded encounter between Diamond and Emma. How much of Emma’s sexual performance — the whimpering, the chewing of the lip — was artifice and how much was natural? Of course, I was flattering myself by suggesting that I’d be able to tell whether her behaviors were authentic just because they manifested with me and not with Diamond, or vice versa. Were they a sign of her pleasure, or of her interest in pleasing me?

In one of the equipment lockers, I found the HMI lighting rig I was looking for, and also a big black shoulder-mounted video camera. It was just a little smaller than the sort a news crew might use. I slipped the memory card into my pocket. Diamond came to me a moment later, so I turned around, closed the locker door with my ass, and pushed the light case up against his chest. "Help me set this up," I said.

"You’re going to shoot here?"

"I didn’t drag the statuette with me just to bring it back home."

"What if someone comes in and sees you using school property?" Diamond said.

"That’s why you’re here," I said. "What if someone saw me walking off with school property?"

"Why should I help you?" he said, but he quickly realized that the only way to thwart me was to leave, and to leave was to leave me alone with whatever disc or tape or card was holding his sex tape with Emma. "Fine, but let’s do it quickly."

We set up the lights easily enough and cleared a desk. Neither of us was an expert, but we had time and resources. The little portable lights I had pulled from the supply locker were inadequate, but in the back room were more-significant-looking lights with Fresnel lenses and a few HMI lights that emitted light of a color temperature closer to that of sunlight. The back room of the A/V office had been at one point a full-service TV soundstage of small size but significant amperage. After digging through dusty equipment of recent and ancient vintage, we managed to find the power for our needs. The outlets along the wall were industrial strength. We snaked extension cords back into the office areas and crammed seven huge lights into the front room to better blast the statuette.

It grew very warm. Both of us were sweating from both the labor and the output of the lamps. I went for my phone to take a picture and Diamond guffawed. "After all that," he said, "you’re going to use that 3G piece of junk? Use a real camera." He hefted one of the many cameras he had examined during our search and handed it over. Our work was not yet nearly done — he had extracted a promise not to leave until we either found his sex tape or he was satisfied that it wasn’t in the office, after all.

It took a moment to set up a tripod and then to figure out the buttons. The camera was a still/video hybrid. At first, I was recording video, not snapping a still. On playback, Diamond noticed it first.

"They’re moving," he said. "I mean, they look like they’re moving." He was breathing heavily, over my shoulder, as we both peered into the viewfinder.

Even the high-def camera and a ton of lighting semi-artfully arranged hadn’t revealed too many details, so we fired up one of the computers with a big screen and connected the camera to it.

"It’s amazing that nobody’s walked in yet," Diamond said.

"You just said that this statue moves and it’s amazing that nobody wanted a slide projector over the past two hours?" I said.

He muttered something and clicked the mouse. We watched the playback carefully and … something seemed to be happening. It could have been anything. A waver in the air from the heat of the lamps, the power of suggestion, or even the property of the blacker-than-black to absorb light, that made it seem like the ants were shuffling along and the humans writhing or quivering. We talked about what this could mean. Shadows, an explicit optical illusion, or could there be nanotubes working in concert like a rug of cilia? Finally, we realized.

"We are not scientists." Diamond said it before I did. "Forget I said anything. Just go home. Let’s just leave all this shit here. Someone else will pick it up tomorrow, I’m sure."

"And what about what you wanted to find?"

"You know what?" Diamond said. "Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. They got you; that’s enough. The provosts can point to you and the article in the Arkham Advertiser. That’s all they need to keep the parents and the alumni happy." I just glared at him, and then he added, "Face it, Gordon — I’m white."

I turned and tripped over one of the power cables, or thought I did. Diamond rushed to my side to pick me up, or I thought he did. Then I saw the statuette in his hands, high over his head, and he brought it down on mine.

My comments here may seem a little usual, but I have had some time to think and would like to express my thoughts before I go any further. Or before I lose track of my thoughts. You might call it an epiphany. Semioticians interrogate the tropologies of discourse, unearth subaltern subjectivities via the deconstructive process of retaxonomification of pre-extant bricolage to reify the parole of bourgeois subjectivity. That is, we wage civil war against a nominal realism that limns our own lived-in experiences.

What I mean to say is this: We think very carefully about what words mean and the baggage that comes along with them. Most of the time, that baggage represents the social needs of authority, or the personal needs of identity, or the struggle between them.

Or, to put it yet another way, when Professor Diamond declared that he was white — which of course I already knew from apprehending his body-as-text (e.g., looking at his fool face) — he wasn’t just making a comment about melanin but about the ideology of whiteness vis-à-vis the state and the bourgeois family, and about its negation in blackness. By setting white as a privileged default, an unutterable subjectivity, he ironically placed my blackness under erasure.

By which I mean to say, finally, that when he said he could fuck all the girls and mess with all the equipment he liked because he was white, I should have punched him in the teeth. But I didn’t, because even dismissed and humiliated, I was still holding to the social norms of collegiality. And when I saw the statuette in his hands, I knew that I really should have hit him, no matter what. Diamond cannot help but obey the law, as the law is nothing short of those things white people choose to do, made text. I cannot help but be an outlaw, because I am embodied outlawry.

Punching Diamond in the teeth would have led to my arrest, almost certainly, and a conviction for assault and battery, almost certainly, and public shame even greater than what I was already experiencing thanks to my forced retirement and his wormlike white dick pulsing away in Emma’s gash. But at least I wouldn’t have a bump the size of an egg on my right temple. And maybe I wouldn’t have been so easily waylaid and bound by my colleague-cum-cuckold, if "cuckold" is really the right word. If there were any such thing as right words.

Next time, the angry black kid inside me lectured, knock a motherfucker out.

When I awoke, Emma was there. She didn’t look happy — this wasn’t one of our bondage games, which she grew bored of anyway after finding a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey on her mother’s nightstand during the intercessional trip home to the Upper West Side. But I was expertly hog-tied, with a rope around my neck and my knees aching from the stretch.

"Hey," she said. She sounded far away, like there was a large aquarium between us.

"Why…." There was an infinity of implied words to come after that. Why am I tied up? Why are you here? Why have you betrayed me? Am I going to be killed? What do you know about the statuette and when did you know it? Can you be sure that your beliefs about the statuette are at all reflective of reality, or is this simply a discursive folie à deux between you and, presumably, Diamond? Are you at all familiar with the long history of the binding and torture of black bodies, and the imperial colonizing claims on "native artifacts" that this theft and kidnapping so precisely concretize?

Emma shrugged. "We’ve been looking over the recording you made. You know I had Lasik last year, remember? No more Kate Spade cat’s-eye glass frames for me, not now that the freshmen girls all seem to be issued a pair during orientation. Anyway, it went really well.

"I have 20/10 vision in both eyes now." Then she smiled and crossed her arms again. "I could see the little ants move and devour the little men."

"But … it’s all about the screen resolution, not your eyesight."

"I don’t mean I saw them on the screen. I saw them in your office. It was just luck that you walked into Professor Diamond’s office, just luck that he had a side bitch —"

"Maybe you’re the side bitch."

"Maybe you’re the side bitch!" she shouted, and kicked me in the teeth. Her feet were little, but it still hurt a bit. I ran my tongue over my teeth. No chips, which I was grateful for given that my dental insurance was going to expire at the end of the month.

"Anyway, it all worked out is the thing. We’re going to keep the statuette."

"… and kill me?" I asked. I was more than a little confused and only partially thanks to the spike of pain in my skull. They could have killed me, already.

Emma was suddenly confused, as well. Her confidence eroded somewhere in the course of "Of course not." Of sounded haughty, not was very tentative. "Of course not," she said, ultimately meaning the opposite.

"We’re not killers," Emma said. "And Professor Diamond needs you. That’s what he said. I wouldn’t be a party to anything as tawdry, or as awful, as a murder."

I could only think to ask, Do you call him "Professor Diamond" in bed? So, for a long moment, I said nothing. Then, finally, I asked, "So, what do you expect to do? Let me go, to have you arrested? White skin privilege won’t lead to immunity from prosecution in this sort of deranged sex kidnapping."

"Oh," Diamond said. I hadn’t sensed him in the room earlier, and had no way to turn around and face him, or to see who else might be with him. "It’s more of a sex-and-occult kidnapping. After we’re done, there will be no need for us to worry about law enforcement."

"You can’t possibly believe in the occult," I said. I felt foolish saying that. Of course anyone could believe in the occult, or in Jesus, or in the political utility of voting for the Democrats over the Republicans. And even if one did not believe in any such thing, they might still behave as if they did. Historico-spiritual fictions are limned with the coercive discursive structures of everyday life; essentialist notions of belief, or the negation of belief ("You can’t possibly believe…" is just as impossible a belief as anything else and yet, there I was) are self-annihilating as reality itself as an ultimately inapprehensible object reproduced via the extraction of surplus meanings from its partial and contingent processes.

And then Diamond put his palm on my forehead, placed something under my neck — the statuette, I realized — and then leaned down with all his weight onto the back of my head.

I found myself crawling along what I seemed to instinctively understand as a strand of hair. With every inhalation, I felt that my lungs would burst from being overfull, but if I attempted a shallow breath, or even to stop crawling, an immense pressure weighed down on me, slamming my chest to the rounded surface of the hair, my limbs splayed around the curved surface. Imagine a log bridge stretched, not over a river, but along it, twisting and turning in parallel with the bank. I clutched and moved, clutched and moved. Whether the wounds to my head and neck were gone or just of lesser importance than the radical alteration of my environment and circumstance, I did not yet know.

Obviously, I had somehow been moved onto the statuette, to be one of the tiny, moving man-figures being chased by ants. Obviously, I thought. That was my last thought for quite a while, as the immediate business of hugging the tubular strand on which I had been deposited, and crawling and hitching myself along by turns, had taken precedence.

If I sound rather sanguine about the experience now, after the fact ("Fact," he says, with a wince), it is due to two things: I am now free of the statuette ("Free," he says, with a wince) and as an artifact of my academic training. The statuette did not end up in my office only because it was a sign-vehicle that appeared to be so aggressively meaningless that cataloging or displaying it would undermine the discursive environment in which it was situated. It was gifted to me because I was a semiotician and a semiotician is ever but one step removed from the occult.

There are different types of sign: The icon, the index and the symbol are three of the more important. The icon is simple enough — think of an outstretched palm. It signals, to most Americans, "Stop!" It is very similar to actually lifting a hand in order to make physical contact with something coming at you. Even if what one wishes to stop is merely a speech act one is being subjected to, or even if one is raising one’s hand while describing the various life-issues one must deal with: treacherous lovers, the tedium of grading undergraduate term papers, a parent’s cancer, rising prices.

Even when it does not mean "stop," an outstretched palm remains an index. In Greece, it is a rude gesture — the one making it is reproducing the physical act of shoving a handful of shit into a target’s face. Indeed, one can say that even then, the gesture still means stop.

Then there is the index, which suggests an absence or a contingency. Picture a stop sign. What does it mean? It means "stop." It means stop sufficiently completely that even the red of the sign, or its shape, or the font used to spell out the word "stop" are often sufficient to impel obedience. At the same time, the iconic stop sign doesn’t simply mean "stop." It is partial and contingent. It doesn’t mean stop your car forever and starve to death behind the wheel. It doesn’t mean stop sipping your coffee, or thinking about your lover, or singing along to an embarrassing pop song on the radio.

It doesn’t even mean stop your car completely. A proper stop is neither a slide nor the complete elimination of forward motion. Implicit and immanent within the stop is its opposite: Go.

Then there is the symbol and this is the realm of the occult. The symbol requires a human mind. Even a dog can be trained to respond to a stop sign, or to an outstretched palm. Icons and indices appear in nature, in the form of mating displays and animal tracks and spoor. But a symbol requires a human mind to interpret and understand it. The close analysis of the statuette Diamond and I participated in transformed the previously inexplicable object into a symbol, when the tiny relief work was revealed. Much of the statuette’s mystery was in fact stripped away. Ants chewing desperate people to pieces and scattering their limbs about is fairly hackneyed, as symbols go.

There’s an old saying: Every cliché was once a revelation. The first person to compare his lover’s blushing cheeks to the petal of a rose was a genius. During my academic career, I wouldn’t try such a line on even the most naÃ¯ve and sheltered of the virgins showing up in my freshman courses. One thousand years ago, when the sculptor was active, perhaps the idea of life being a futile, horrific agony was a new one. The ants are suggestive of military action, mindlessness and the inevitability of rot and decay — consumption, as well. The plantlike construction is somewhat more innovative. The plant here is not a life-giver or healer, but the threshing floor for humanity’s destruction, the playing field of a game with unknown rules and a final score of absolute zero. Presumably, it represented the Earth itself, with its greenery and ultimate estrangement from the human condition. Our very ability to apprehend symbols is what separates us from the other animals, and is that which allows us to perceive our estrangement from the universe. We have grown apart from the world but not beyond it. Our awareness helps us not at all.

All that is what I would have thought, had I my wits about me. Looking back, I was thankful that most of my cognitive ability had abandoned ship. Had I fully understood what I had just experienced, I would have looked up and certainly let go of the stem I was clutching to so fiercely, and would have fallen to my death.

What I would have seen, of course, is a great white moon cracked with red. My own dead eye, hanging over the horizon. The dark sky, my face. I was on the statuette, a part of the relief. I scuttled about, looking for someone who could help. A preposterous notion, since the symbology of the statuette was clear enough — there is no escape; there is not even a moment’s respite.

But onward I crawled. The stem was unoccupied, or perhaps I was just slow and my senses tightly limited to the edge of the curve on which I was crawling. I had no sense of proportion anymore, or any understanding of whether I was even crawling up toward the top of the statuette or down toward the base from which the various obsidian tongues emerged.

Time was also a mystery. All I knew was pressure and an impulse to keep moving. Eventually, as I turned another corner, I encountered someone who appeared to be a man; he was on his hands and knees, swiftly crawling away from me. His feet were bare and he wore what appeared to be either some kind of kilt or chiton. A pair of hairy ass-cheeks were on display, but receded as I followed. I felt an urge to catch up with him, so redoubled my own efforts and finally made my overstuffed lungs work. I called out, Hey!

But all I heard were the scissoring and clicking of mandibles. I was an ant. My lungs weren’t overstuffed; I was breathing with my entire body. I surged forward, not knowing what else to do. Perhaps I thought I could make the man speak, to confess to something? I’d snip off a limb if he remained silent, another if he lied.

Now it strikes me that within all the bizarrerie was another absurdity — somehow, were I to capture this person, I believed that he would speak modern English.

The man crawled faster than me, but the revelation that I was now an ant gave me an advantage; I had six limbs. It took a moment’s concentration to locate them and organize my locomotion to take advantage of the extra appendages. Then I was off.

He felt me coming at him and practically tossed himself over the edge of the stem on which we both crawled. He was out of my sight only for a second, but when I lowered my antennae, I felt a pair of vibrations and then the cold of obsidian. I could see my hands, ten fingers outstretched. And then the man reared his head back over the horizon of the stem, but he was a man no more. He was an ant, though strangely enough — stranger than everything else I’ve described so far, in its own way — the ant looked very much like the man in coloration and posture. His mandibles opened and snapped at my head. I scrambled away. He followed at a thumping gallop, chittering after me. I could smell the acid of his breath, for lack of a better word, though I suppose I mean some sort of excretion, burning the cuffs of my pants and the soles of my shoes.

The man-ant was practiced at his new form and easily caught up to me. He planted one of his limbs on the small of my back. The mandibles wrapped around my left arm and snapped it clean off at the elbow. Everything was pain, and every muscle fiber and nerve ending in my body howled then moved as one. We jerked free. Yes, I feel the first person plural is apposite here, given that my body felt like a million different beings working together as one. We rolled off the edge of the stem, blood spurting high from the stump of my arm.

My legs caught on something and it took a moment to realize that it was the underside of the stem. I was an ant again, with the power to adhere to surfaces even when upside down. I took a quick limb count and was saddened to realize that my left forelimb was missing a segment. I’d learned something about the dynamic of this universe but at a cost. To see another being is to see a fleshy man scrambling away in terror. To be seen is to be a fleshy man and to scramble away in terror. There was no communication to be had, no society, nothing but impulse and rage. In my ant-brain, I felt a hunger for vengeance — a limb for a limb! It hardly mattered whose limb it was; I wanted to be the snapper, not the ensnapped. The other ant headed off, or so the vibrations perceived by my antennae told me. Perhaps a quick success was sufficient for the ant to find new prey, or to find new opportunity to become prey. When I’d viewed the close-up recording of the statuette in the A/V office, I saw only ants and men and scattered limbs. No severed heads, no torsos being consumed. At the time, I presumed that the little relief was a simple and repeated pattern. Now I wondered if our stimuli-response dynamics were truly limited to limb removal. Would I end up a two-limbed ant, dragging myself after a one-armed man on the overside of some stemwork? Or would I be the one-armed man, forever crawling away by the power of my fingertips, the ants too lazy to finish the job, so that my torture — all of our tortures — would be extended indefinitely?

The semiotic possibilities were delicious but too much for my ant-brain. The thoughts were pushed from my head as soon as they formed. I did retain enough of my human-level cogitations to realize that the best thing to do was stay a fucking ant, which meant that no ant should come across me first. I decided that a loop-de-loop pattern, heading down into the base of the statuette, was my best bet. Ants, or at least the type of ant I was, have poor vision, but I could keep some eyes on everything if I walked in loops. My missing forelimb, now painless, was on my left, so I turned to my right side and walked about, swinging my head as I did. It was an impossible task, to watch one’s own ass at all times, but if I even managed to cover the possible vectors of attack half the time, I’d be significantly reducing the threat of transformation back to an inferior, crippled mammal — to use three words I would have found extremely problematic as self-descriptors the day before.

My peculiar path down into the depths of the statuette afforded me quite the view. There were relatively few ants or men crawling about the vein-like stemwork. Perhaps we were all moving at such a speed that from the vantage point outside of the statuette, one of us looked like dozens of us, like a series of images on a film strip. In my little ant way, I breathed two sighs of relief. First, I was pleased that this sort of thing had happened to relatively few people over the last millennium. Perhaps the singular presentation of the statuette led to it being kept under lock and key for so much of its existence, that only a handful of people had ever been trapped here. Second, I breathed a sigh in response to my perception of my own vestigial compassion. I was pleased that I was able to think of others at a time like this, when I was trapped simultaneously in complementary narratives by Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft, to name two authors most popular in my department’s syllabi, about whom I’ll have more to say later.

My tactic worked but not for too long. Happenstance saved me again. The pain returned to my left and the blood started spurting. I howled and flailed and saw that an ant had clocked me from another vein, but as I slid off the rounded surface — ironically thanks to not being able to secure my position with my left — I left the line of sight and transformed again. I scuttled about the underside of the vein a bit, the obsidian wall scraping against the side of my thorax, until the vein came to an end.

The statuette no longer had a shape; it was simply geography. The transition from item to place — or rather, the radical adjustment of both my Being and subjectivity — was a compelling framework, one that nearly sent me scuttling to look for an ant so that I could transform back to my human self and be fully capable of a close reading. As an ant, I knew enough to know what I had been and what I did not know, but not much more than that. Should I, would I, die as a human being radically alienated from his environment, even as it would allow some intellectual stimulation, or should I stay alive as an ant, and experience a new Geworfenheit heretofore unavailable to anyone, even to the other men currently entrapped on the statuette? My presumption, given the statuette’s provenance and its long storage in my office — and, prior to that, on a shelf in the small broom-closet office of the Massachusetts Journal of Algonquin Archeology — is that nobody else "here" had my exposure and training in Theory.

The population of men and ants thickened as I approached the lower center of the statuette, where the flamelike projections of obsidian on which the veins wrapped like kudzu all met. Because of my view, there were more men than ants, as my gaze itself was the transformative, decentering agent. However, as projections grew closer together, the veinwork upon them grew more complex, and there were more nooks and carve-outs in which to hide. I had to be extra careful to not only avoid being seen without seeing, but to avoid unseen spaces under the assumption that from them, I might be seen. Again, my intellectual training held me in good stead, though as an ant, I was barely operating above the level of instinct.

One of the men, and they were all identical save for the number of limbs and the exact amount and vectors of blood splatters on their tunics, appeared to be somewhat familiar to me. Something about the way he crawled with all four of his little limbs made me wish to follow along and so, I did. I realized that communication was going to be impossible for the most part. If I turned away and became a human being again, the little man would transform into an ant and snap off another of my limbs. As an ant, all I could do was express chemicals and scrape my mandibles against one another. The surface on which we all crawled was too hard and dense for me to scratch a message into it. And yet, I followed, an absurdity chasing an absurdity based on a hunch.

On five and a half limbs, and fueled by intellectual curiosity, I quickly cornered my target. He turned to me and screamed.

Specifically, he screamed my name.

I knew I was right. Though I suppose ants don’t normally do this sort of thing, I tucked my forelimbs under me, to mimic a bow, to suggest that I had come in peace. The man, one of many identical simulacra of men, was Emma. Presumably, by the same subtle perceptions with which I was able to discern her in this new form, she was able to sense me. It was strange — an understatement — that when I was human, I saw myself as myself, black-embodied, thick of limb and a little of belly, manicured nails, and the like. Did other ants, or other men, see me as a small and ruddy red-haired man in a chiton? It hardly mattered, I suppose, given my predicament, but it seemed likely. The men all saw themselves as individuals regardless of their actual gender, or race, or other subjectivity; ants saw them all as identical men

"Look up!" Emma-the-Man cried, her voice a man’s tinny shriek. And she pointed upward. It was a challenge, in my ant body, to turn up without taking my eyes off Emma-Man — and yes, I know that gender is a continuum, but Emma never performed or expressed an identity preference for any sort of non-binary queered gender fluidity before. Perhaps she still subjectively experienced her body and her performativity as a contingent women, even though the ants around her saw her as a man. Finally, I managed to make a fairly complicated five-point turn that allowed me both to focus up into what I am going to arbitrarily label the "sky" while also keeping my gaze on Emma, thus transfixing her ephemeral male embodiment.

What I saw in the sky was great and pink. I realized that it was Emma’s cheek. After "killing" me with the statuette, Diamond and Emma must have pulled my neck and face from the statuette. Then what happened? Did Emma have second thoughts? No. No, I thought, you that might have been my ant-being, cynical and desirous of blood and vengeance, talking. Did Emma help Diamond extricate the points of the statuette from my face? Maybe take it to a sink to wash it off while Diamond did something to my body? And then, after the statuette was all clean and perhaps resting on a countertop, Emma running her fingers sensually along the black flames, did Diamond just rush up to her and with a meaty palm slam her face into the sculpture?

Something in me quivered at the thought. What little human compassion I had was being diluted by my ant-blood. It was a primitive way to think, a method predicated on transactional retribution, and a craving for totality and unity. I wanted to be myself again, whole and alive in the world above. I wanted to see Emma and Diamond dismembered, limbs everywhere, entwined sexually but also torn apart like an exploded diagram of the physical act of love. Two people turned inside out and mixed together, the borders of individuality and identity eradicated.

"You have to get me back up there! I can crawl into myself!" Emma said. "I’ll ride you, reanimate myself, and then put you back into yourself. Diamond said that would work, that the statuette isn’t a death sentence but a prison."

I considered this. The claim was ludicrous, of course, but so was our current situation. I’ve always been a polylogist, but there was no hermeneutic praxis contingent upon any of my identities that could help here. Not as a cishet, male-assigned, black, American, former academic reduced to the precariat existing in the imperial center during a period of neoliberal austerity; not as an ant; not as anything.

I glanced past the Emma-man into the depths of the statuette. I realized that my strategy was merely a tactic: Get down there and stay an ant. But that wouldn’t solve any of my problems, especially the problem of actually being an ant on a statuette while my great enemy was free to carry me about, shove me in a closet, or even publish a paper about the material culture of whatever ghastly society of mystics and warlocks produced this thing, while I remained the victim of violent erasure, a footnote conspicuous by its absence.

A thought came to mind, unbidden. Let’s say I did manage to crawl down to the very base of the statuette. The universe was a small place now and very little could possibly exist in such a small, discursive realm. There were men, crawling and screaming and bleeding, and ants, marching and snapping and watching their backs. The only other thing in this microcosm was the fact of its own existence. (There I go again, with a vulgar appeal to "fact.") What could possibly await me in the bowels of the statue except some wily ant, perhaps with a man associate, and another teeny statue on which my head, or someone’s head, would be impaled? What else could possibly exist? It was an absurd thought, but yes, absurdity ruled down here in this obsidian forest, just as it did up there in the world of linguistic gamesmanship, obscure authority, and discourses in need of deconstruction.

I needed my body back, even if it simply meant taking one last breath and dying in agony in the corner of whatever dim and disused office where Diamond had secreted my body.

Emma’s stratagem suggested a certain immunity to the risk of transformation, as well. If she rode on me, she might become an ant if she saw another man. I might transform back into a person, a man on my back, were an ant to spy me. But what if Emma were to keep alert and spy any ants before I did. She would already be in man-form and thus, I presumed, immune to some subsequent transformation into something else. Of course, I could not communicate my theory to her — a problem I had back in class, as well, thus her disappointing grade, and desire for revenge and some other dude’s cock — but she was pretty smart and would perhaps figure it out. She had managed to get further into the statuette than I and all her limbs were intact.

I knelt as best I could on my five and a half limbs and she hopped on, her male limbs fairly powerful. (Emma had been an equestrienne — good thighs. I had no idea whether strength carried over from body to body, but my truncated limb had, so it was a possibility.) She said, "I’ll scan our surroundings, okay?" Uptalk again, but desperate, afraid and authentic. I could feel it in my thorax. And so, we climbed, slow and awkward at first, with me down a limb and carrying unfamiliar freight, plus Emma was fidgety in her male body. After a few moments, I thought she had become erect and was rubbing against my exoskeleton, but that was just a passing ant-fancy.

The trip up was a spectacle. The screaming of men echoed in the canyons between the obsidian peaks. Occasionally, an arm or leg came spiraling first toward and then away from us. One ant made a stunning leap from a neighboring peak to ours, only to transform into a man when it fell under Emma’s gaze. I tore his head off and the head fell screaming, while the headless body scampered after it. An interesting epiphenomenon of absurdist immortality. Perhaps the bottom of the statuette wasn’t simply a temple with another statuette on it but a lake of writhing limbs and howling heads sucking air in through half-crushed esophagi. All the more reason to head upstairs, where the ruined face of my treacherous lover was waiting for me, and beyond that, my nemesis, and beyond that, a world which had become radically decentered even beyond the scope of explication by Theory, thanks to an occult intrusion that questioned the very laws of Western — a word I add more out of habit and custom than anything — physics.

Because if there is this statuette, then anything is possible. There are other artifacts in other universities, some gathering dust and others perhaps being used like the statuette was, to carry out bizarre schemes for revenge. In the margins, among the subaltern, which religious and supernatural beliefs are not just discursive but definitive? A polylogism that is material rather than an epiphenomenon of the mutually eliding intertwining of authority and language; the gaps of one filled in by the other. If postmodernism teaches us anything — and "postmodernism teaches" is yet another phrase that deserves an asterisk, a typographical "Not so fast, white man!" — it is that power is an empty place. Mutual antagonisms — there’s that white man again and I imagine Professor Diamond lording over me now — between identity groupings tear asunder the political potentiality of the nation-state, the "people", or even the Godhead. There is no sovereign, not even information, not even the constituent matrix of equations and wave-particle behaviors that inform matter and energy, which are constituent in chemical reactions, from which biological processes are emergent, and from which a contingent human consciousness arises within a politico-social milieu that is both programmed by and in turn programs matter.

To put it in layman’s terms, or in first-day first-minute Pomo 101 terms, I am a motherfucking ant!

And I was an ant before as well, but there was no Diamond crushing me, no other ants looking to strip me of my contingent anthood and render me powerless, and no obvious set of obstacles carved into black stone that I had to navigate. Instead, the social universe was my statuette, and is your statuette, but we couldn’t even see it. I did sense it though, write about it, lecture about it, read books about it, think about it over a bottle of white wine or a rolled joint, and laugh about it whenever I stubbed my toe and tried to wish the pain away.

The statuette is meaningless and absurd — a realm without God or nation or race of any gender but cismale, and if there’s sex here, I don’t want to hear about it. Without the discursive framework of these now-empty authorities, all that’s left is stone, the crunching of bone and sinew in the grip of mindless mandibles. Your God and my God are two different things, even if He comes from the same Abrahamic tradition. A politician may declare some unmarked subset of citizens "Real Americans." I have it on good authority that cishet men should not declare themselves to be bisexual until they’ve sucked a cock, as if they are just the recipients of fellatio. They are perhaps not constituted as passive, but are in fact imaginative agents of heteronomativism. That is, they close their eyes and imagine a girl, on her knees, sucking them off instead of a dude.

Colleagues and students, deans and provosts, Ms. President and honored members of the board, sleepers and those who have just wandered in, it works.

But power is hidden. Hidden behind the Allah that both Muslims and Arab-speaking Christians call to, and whom sometimes, they insist is the same being, but who in political practice, appears to be a duo of entities at war with its constituent self. Hidden behind the Americans who see gay marriage as constitutional and the Americans who see a pre-postreligion Christian morality as constitutional. Hidden behind the snarled streetcorner call of "Suck my dick, bitch!" between men who don’t want other men to suck their dicks even as they command it, so to transform their male opponents into enthusiastic female lovers. Except that women have reclaimed the word bitch to express their own masculinist desires.

Because power is contradictory and self-negating, it is everywhere. But we cannot be everywhere. And indeed, at one point, Emma’s vision lapsed, or mine did, and I found myself screaming and bleeding, a little white man, again. A moment later, I was being crushed by the Emma-ant atop me. She had missed an ant, somewhere. The ant saw me; I transformed. She saw me transforming under her and transformed herself.

And that is when all logic and reason left me, when even a sense of absurdity left me, and I was just afraid. Her mandibles stretched wide open and then she lowered them to the statuette, one pincer on either side of me. With a snap, I’d be done. Not dead, simply done, mind and body separated and falling and once fallen, never to be reconstituted or unitary again, either as a subject or as a body.

I wasn’t thinking such rarified thoughts at the time. I wasn’t even thinking what I found myself thinking last winter when my tires skidded on some treacherous black ice atop black asphalt. I didn’t think, Lord have mercy! in a voice partially my own and partially that of my grandmother. I didn’t even think to scream, or to close my eyes, or to contemplate the infinite moment between life and death. I was just afraid.

To speak as plainly as language allows, I was just fear.

Then another ant came up behind her and Emma didn’t see it. She was in my arms again, blood coating her male body and mine. Then over her male shoulder, I saw the ant who had not seen me and I was an ant again, and she was on my belly. She rolled off and I rolled over, and she climbed on and I galloped, no longer feeling any fear at all, but extruding plenty of it biochemically.

And soon, there we were, at the top of the peak we were climbing, just a few inches from Emma’s right ear, the lobe torn and a rivulet of blood slowly oozing from the ear canal. Another empty space in which power can be asserted.

I turned to face the length of the sculptural element we had just climbed in case any ants or men had followed us and Emma slid off my gaster. "Oh, God, oh, God!" she said, panting and tired from the exertion of hanging onto me while I did all the work. Now she smelled of fear, of fresh fear as well as my own biochemical cloud of the same. "My fucking face, oh, God. It’s so huge and dead. It fills up the whole fucking sky like God. I can’t, I can’t climb up in there. I don’t know what to do."

And in a moment, I did. I pivoted and turned and snapped off Emma’s head, just as she would have done to me had she not been interrupted by a wandering ant. Then, as her body fell past me, I marched up toward her ear. Her blood made it difficult and stirred some sensation similar to hunger, but I made my way into her ear canal and started, for lack of a better term, chewing.

Had I been a true ant — that is, an ant visible to the naked eye and squishable by the naked finger — I never would have managed it. But recall that only by flooding the statuette with light and using a zoom lens could we see anything at all on the surface of the blacker-than-black statuette. Even then, we could see very little. Though the universe is constituted upon occult ironies, there is sufficient material consistency in our experiences to keep the very framework of the universe occulted — that is, hidden. Don’t imagine an ant, imagine an ant-shaped impulse, riding a vestibulocochlear nerve directly into the brain. As the universe is an occult phenomenon, there is no particular reason why a full-sized ant — or, for that matter, a full-sized elephant — could not simultaneously be as large as it is and be the size of an electrochemical nerve impulse, except that the universe is in fact deceitful. It wants us to believe that the laws of physics are universal rather than contingent, definitive as opposed to antagonistic, unitary instead contradictory, and ultimately apprehensible instead of just partially amenable to comprehension via limited discursive frameworks. So, rather than being an ant of normal size traversing a nerve much smaller than I, I was a somewhat more believable-to-a-hypothetical-observer ant of microscopic size traversing a nerve into which I fit … except for the fact that I was an ant-embodied human and not an ant at all.

I was a microscopically small ant, an impossible creature, and in being so, I was constituted as a God. In Emma’s brain, I physically dissolved into a set of desires, reflexes, impulses and cogitations. I pulled myself — or should I say, Emmaself? — up from the statue and willed the body to heal. Diamond was — as many are, including right now — distracted. Yes, he was looking at his smartphone. One could hardly blame him. For all the limits of discontents and late capitalism, it has managed to synthesize hundreds of millions of tiny boxes stuffed with all the world’s known information, suppositions and entertainments, and then distributed them to twenty percent of the total human population.

And then, if you look at it too much, we laugh at you and complain.

What could Diamond have been doing on his phone while, a few feet away, the body of his lover — the second person he had murdered that afternoon — was slumped over a table, her face multiply impaled on a statuette? Well, with access to all the world’s information, suppositions and entertainments, he could have been doing virtually anything at all. Virtually anything contingently, materially possible within the delimitations set by the occult powers that rule this cosmos, anyway. Perhaps he was texting a fence, or uploading pictures of the statuette, or telling his wife that he’d be home late, or downloading something from Miskatonic University’s new e-library. Maybe he was playing Threes.

But Emma was not complaining about Diamond’s distracted use of his smartphone just then, as Emma raised the statuette and, very cleverly, did not bring the spiked top of it onto Professor Diamond’s head, but instead used the rather-more-mundane-seeming base, just as Diamond had done to me earlier that day. And then Emma kept smashing and smashing and smashing.

Emma — that is to say, me Dr. Ewing, recently mired by scandal and in forced retirement, and then beaten and kidnapped and killed and transformed into an insect, and then nearly consumed by one, and then reunited with a scorned lover, and who then rose up from the underworld in new flesh to have his revenge — then drove to her home, where she was let in by her roommate and changed clothes. I selected for her body — and yes I admit that my hands lingered here and there — a vantablack dress. Then she drove to my house — the Ewing house — and set about writing the keynote speech he was to give on the subject of semiotics and the occult.

Or rather, she set about typing the speech. I was writing it. I then emailed it to Emma — the notional Emma who visited with her roommates and put on a vantablack dress, along with a note to say that I was indisposed and that she should give the talk instead of me. In exchange for this service, I would change her grade to an A and thus leave her grade point average unmolested. Well, less molested than her body, anyway.

And now, colleagues, deans, provosts, students, board members, and guests, here we are. Is the statuette a metaphor or some sort of allegory? Perhaps, in the grossest of ways, yes. After all, it is an icon, semiotically speaking. A sunset is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and it is an icon as well, limned with a variety of aesthetic, romantic, political, cultural, and historical meanings. Is this postmodern trickery? Of course it is. The universe is itself postmodern trickery that only appears materially constituent and unitary to most observers. That is, the laws of physics and materialist analysis of matter, energy, space, geography, and history have a Lakotian hardcore of predictive and explanatory utilities because we do not understand the universe. Via perception we assert, but we can only assert so far as our perceptions reach. Or, like the old man once said, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

This is a sentence worth deconstructing. "Mercy," which Lovecraft considered a constituent part of "the world," comes from the middle Latin merx, or merchandise. Merx, as a word, is a constituent part of the mercari, to buy or trade, which in term informs the mercatus — a gathering in order to trade merchandise. From this comes the English word ‘market.’ This, as our friends in the department of political economy reminds us, is the best way to understand all voluntary human behavior. A mercy is a price left unpaid or partially unpaid. And here we are again, up against that old devil capitalism and its mother-cum-sister: debt.

There are many unserviced or underserviced debts in the world. Indeed, all are, by definition, and this is universal. But as we just learned, nothing is universal, because the universe is ultimately an emergent property of occult powers in a dialectical antagonism with human perceptions. There is a notion of entropy, the inevitability of the heat death of the universe, because we will it so. And why might we will it so? Why might we be so dour? Why not instead perceive a universe of plenty, of expansion? Shouldn’t we instead contemplate a utopian poetics of thermodynamics — energy and matter that can be created from the void?

Sounds good, but in fact, that would not be more merciful than the most merciful thing in the world. What can be created can be destroyed, and indeed would necessarily be destroyed by that which comes after, sooner or later. A man will crush an ant under his heel, only to one day fall sick and die, and offer up his flesh to the ants. So, in our fear, we imagine a mercy — nothing ever really dies. That is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die. I’m sure you all know that one. Rejoice — the aeon is strange and death may now die. Lord have mercy on death’s soul.

And yet, the mercy we imagine and that we constitute via our imaginations is ultimately no better than the merciless occult universe of infinite creation and destruction to which we blind and deafen ourselves. The situation is Kafkaesque, but in a Kafkaesque situation, at least we know what to expect. And so, in my story of the statuette, we have a logic. Inexplicably, there are men and there are ants. And when an ant sees a man, the man must run. And when a man sees an ant, an ant he becomes, and the ant, now a man, must run. And on the blacker-than-black surface of the statuette, there is really no way to run and no place to hide. And yet, with a little thinking and a little teamwork, one might stay an ant for an extended period of time.

In that, there is hope. That is the mercy about which Lovecraft speaks and the reason for which Kafka searches. Why did the Hunger Artist so publicly starve himself? Well, he just wasn’t hungry. Why did Gregor Samsa wake up one morning, transformed into an insect? The answer isn’t in the text explicitly, but it is rather obvious. He no longer wanted to be a traveling salesman. However, without his income, but with his presence, his family would suffer. Once Gregor dies, everything is fine. His parents can save money by moving to a smaller place, and his sister can blossom and marry.

Everything happens for a reason in Kafka, despite the horror. Everything happens for a reason in Lovecraft, because the horror. "Because the horror." Just like the kids on the Internet speak!

So, why am I here, in a vantablack evening dress, reading a speech prepared by a disgraced former professor of a useless subject, telling a crazy story about murder and magic, and now discussing the limits of reason and the possibility of creation? The most obvious reason is this — Dr. Ewing hates you all, is too humiliated to come to his own Smith Keynote, and is playing one last postmodern prank. But why would I, Emma, be a part of this if it were a postmodern prank, since I was the one who turned him in to the Dean for seducing me after I only got a B- in his class?

Well, as I said, Emma is deceased. Or close enough for academic work; Emma-the-Man, headless body and screaming head, won’t be returning to this body. I am Dr. Ewing, now re-embodied in the body of the young white girl whose body I had won via seduction. As my sainted grandmother might say, Lord have mercy! And indeed, there is a mercy here. Mercy in that there is an unpaid price. I did not give Emma the grade she thought she deserved for spreading her legs, but she still spread her legs.

Lord have mercy.

I was found out, but I had tenure and so, I was not fired immediately.

Lord have mercy.

Emma, despite her anger with me, was still always DTF — that’s "down to fuck" for the professors emeriti in the house — and so, even helped me clean out my office.

Lord have mercy.

The statuette, which had been in my possession for years, piqued her interest. And also the interest of another of her lovers, Professor Diamond.

Lord have mercy.

And I was slain! Slain because of my arrogance, my lustfulness, my greed.

Lord have mercy.

And I arose again, in a new world, a world without end, a more authentic world. The price is yet unpaid!

Lord have mercy.

And in that new world, I contrived a way to escape and indeed, I managed it, into a new body, this body! Emma’s body!

Lord have mercy, indeed!

And yet, the price goes unpaid. I did not have to be fired. I did not have to be confronted. I did not have to experience the humiliation of bondage, the pain of impalement, the disaster of amputation, the fear of the prey, but I did. And for what?

Because I fucked this body before you? A body of which I am now in such complete possession that I am literally inside it, directing its actions, reading this speech in a voice that now is my own and was just formerly Emma’s?

Lord, as we say, have mercy.

And I’ve been an impossible ant, an unlikely human, and now a doppelganger of my own nemesis. A black man, now a white girl. I have been to the occult edge of the universe, have died, and have been resurrected.

Lord have mercy.

Well, I think I won’t.

I hope — in the Kafkaesque sense, as I will explain — you like the dress. I selected it for a reason. A material reason, that is — my sartorial choice was not just a matter of poetics or irony. This is a vantablack dress. A nanoblack dress that absorbs light and other forms of radiation on either side of the visible light. It is blacker than black. It doesn’t exactly show off my new curves. But it does have a peculiar property, much as the statuette does.

Simply by scraping the fabric against the black flame tongue structures of the statuette, I was able to capture innumerable little men, myriad tiny ants. And as I stood up here, gesturing and pointing to my paper, and looking up at you, and occasionally brushing my hands against the sides of this fairly luscious body, they have been flaking off. This body has 20/10 vision, but I don’t bother using it anymore. As the first and only person to push my way to absolute freedom, to slip the binds of the universe of the black statuette — which, I’ll point out one more time is not a metaphor or a thought experiment designed for your amusement — I can see everything, from raw concepts to particles so small and tentative that they only exist in the spaces between femtoseconds. And so, I can see my ants and my men, and they have been trudging over to all of you, transforming and retransforming as they did so. Some of you are now infected by men. Some of you are now infected by ants. But ants are men and men are ants, so as categories, it matters not who or what has proximately infected you, due to the nature of your ultimate infection.

All of you are now infected by me.

Ladies and gentlemen, deans and provosts, honored guests and snot-nosed students, put down your fucking smartphones.

See? Did you see that? You all did it. When was the last time you were in a lecture hall and every single person put down their smartphones on command? Never. This has never happened. It’s one of the annoying things we built into our perceptual universe over the last several years. Hahaha, we seek knowledge in the palm of our hands a little too much; ain’t we funny monkeys? It’s a miracle! And what do we say when we see a miracle?

Lord have mercy.

Yes, that’s right.

And you little bastards never find it. But now, deans and provosts, colleagues and suck-ups, graduate students and post-docs and even lower forms of life — if you can imagine such a thing — you will find it. You will find as a constituent part of my subjectivity. Power, as discussed earlier, is an empty place. When we put in a God, or a nation-state, or a notion such as honor or the family, we are in fact putting in nothing but the empty space that those content-free concepts cannot fill.

But I can fill it. I already have. First this room, and your minds, and your phones. And you will tweet, and call, and meet people for drinks, and kiss your spouses and your mothers, and fuck strangers up the ass, and perhaps someone in the A/V department will record you fucking strangers up the ass and upload the resulting video to the Internet, and you’ll publish papers in prestigious journals that will be misunderstood and summarized in high-brow magazines, and in turn misunderstood and summarized in low-brow magazines, and then finally misunderstood and summarized in the comments sections of blog posts. Then, in turn, all who see or read or kiss or fuck or think or breath will be filled by me, and become a constituent-but-non-antagonist element of a discursive realm not just dominated by me, but mutually and simultaneously constituent of me and an emergent property of me.

Me have mercy!

But like I said, I won’t.

But not because I don’t want to. Please, please believe this. Remember when I spoke of the compassion I had for the other tiny men trapped in the statuette with me? It’s true. It’s true. It was a Kafkaesque hope, a ray of light in a prison so blacker than black that it absorbs rays of light. I won’t have mercy because I cannot have mercy. Because the most merciful thing about the world, we think, is that the human mind cannot correlate its contents. And yet, thanks to Theory and thanks to my recent supernatural experiences, I can correlate its contents and have correlated its contents. I have, in fact, become the language of the correlation of its contents. A semiotician is one step removed from the Occult, but I have taken that step and have become the Occult.

And so, I am fresh out of mercy. And so, all of you will suffer and suffer greatly.

Must it always end in bloodshed, in intestines splattered across the walls, in starving children and parents who live just long enough to see them die? Well, yes. It always has in the past. I am hardly the first one to escape the statuette and crawl up into some body’s ear — and please note I mean some-space-body, not the unitary concept of somebody. I am not your first God. But I hope, and I really do hope this with all the golden rays of my exposed heart, that I will be your last God. Your unitary, fully constituent, impossible-real sovereign forever and ever, world without end. Theory has brought us to the end of grand narratives; there’s nothing left to believe in. Finally, we and our ideas and our smartphones have hollowed out completely the space in the inky black of the universe that empty place where power resides, with no more appeal to God or race or nation or the market or love or language or physics or mercy. All bills are paid in full.

And now, administrators and administrated, acolytes and initiated, students and drop-outs, hangers-on and soon-to-hanged, my prefatory remarks are over and my keynote lecture shall begin. First slide, please.

Originally appeared in the collection The Nickronomicon (Innsmouth Free Press, 2014)

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law (Dark Horse, 2013), The Last Weekend (Skyhorse 2016), and I Am Providence (Skyhorse 2016). His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2013, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, and many other venues. His short work with a Lovecraftian bent was collected in The Nickronomicon (Innsmouth Free Press, 2014), and his most recent anthology is Hanzai Japan (Haikasoru, 2015). For Apex Publications, Nick produced the how-to writing guide Starve Better in 2011.

Interview with Cover Artist David Demaret

Russell Dickerson

APEX MAGAZINE: Apex Magazine’s cover this month is David Demaret’s "The Observatory," a piece that reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich’s "Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist." In both pieces, the central character seems to be contemplating something. When you are creating your characters, especially with a piece like this, how closely do you put yourself in the character’s shoes? Does it start with the intimate idea of what they are thinking, or do you start more broadly with the idea of the observatory over the clouds and sea?

David Demaret: I’m humbled by that comparison and now that you mention it, I might have been influenced by this piece of art in a subconscious way! This is one of my first pieces when I wanted to do very scifi pieces, and I remember that I had some vision with that exact scene as a sketch. The idea is to depict out of this world and fantastic views, invent places where you can witness places in the universe in an impossible way. There’s an easter egg in that image, if you zoom on the top/middle part of the arm, you can read "sic transit Gloria mundi," the Latin for, "thus goes the glory of the world."

AM: Your compositions and settings range from character close ups to large space battles, and everything in between. What are the differences in your approach when you are working on close versus distant imagery? Are your methods for painting a landscape similar to a space battle, or are they different techniques?

DD: Well, it depends on the subject and if the character is important. If it’s about a main character, it’s gonna be close to him/her. Otherwise, a battle needs a large view in general. It’s also about the demand of the client. I try to follow what he/she asks for. There are no different methods for these different views, I’m only careful for a nice and interesting composition, which is at the core of any type of good image anyway.

AM: When you are creating scenes in space, with large ships and even battles, how do you balance the detail work on each ship versus the composition of the overall layout? Is the effect of color and contrast more (or less) important than the details, in something like "Imperfect Sword"?

DD: Well, I’m thinking in "planes" — foreground, middle ground, background — with less and less details and contrast the more it goes away. Then I’m thinking about grouping visually the same objects/characters, and giving them different scales to give depth to the image. I’d say details are not as important as having a good design, interesting shapes, values, and colors. It’s just the icing on the cake and won’t sell an image.

AM: On your DeviantArt page, you have a gallery for a CD set called "Mystified," and you have a number of other book covers in your galleries. Does the need for the graphic design of the final publication affect the choices you make as you are creating a piece?

DD: Yes, for CD covers and the CD itself, you have to take the format as a visual guide and not painting details that won’t appear at all (like the central hole of a CD or the back of a book/cd cover where there will be text lines.

AM: Your DeviantArt page lists a few visual artists that you like, including Beksinski, Frazetta, Monet, and Zorn. Those artists are somewhat different in their approaches, compared to one another. Do your favorite artists influence your individual pieces directly, or is it more that they mix overall across your works?

DD: Yes, I know their art is quite different, but they all have something unique and strong in their way to paint, and that’s what I admire as separate skills!

Beksinski had incredible visions in the "out of this world/never seen before" field. Frazetta was the man that "invented" the heroic fantasy look and feel. He made iconic images like Conan or the death dealer. He is a model. Monet is the master of color and light, and having seen real paintings very close, it’s just fantastic to look at. And Zorn has a fantastic understanding of values and such a simplicity in his strokes, it’s just incredible.

I should add Chris Foss, who made me love sci-fi and giant spaceships, he was my biggest influence. In the end I would like to mix all those qualities! ;) But I’m not there yet.

David Demaret is a freelance illustrator and concept-artist living in Paris, France, specializing in sci-fi and heroic-fantasy art.

He has worked in the videogame industry as a senior graphic artist and art director, working on games such as: Duke Nukem 3D, Driver, King Kong, Lord of the Rings, Ghost Recon, Counterstrike, Legacy of Kain, Dark Messiah, and Brothers in Arms.

Currently, he is focusing on illustrations and concept-art as a new venture, working on novel covers, apps, board games, and RPGs. To see more of his artwork, check out his DeviantArt page.

Photo by John Urbancik

Russell Dickerson has been a published illustrator and designer since the previous millennium, creating works for many genre publications and authors. He has also written many articles for various organizations in that time, including Apex, and his work can be found on his website at www.darkstormcreative.com.

Glitch Rain (Novel Excerpt)

Alex Livingston

Akuba is a low-level hacker for the city’s wealthy, making just enough to keep her bills paid and her booze flowing. Her job is to scrub the social feeds for faces who don’t want to be seen, hanging out at parties to guard the elite from errant social media statuses and incriminating photo posts. Not the most glamorous job, but she’s getting by. When an old debt comes due early, suddenly she is the one who needs to keep her face out of the drones’ omnipresent eyes. Thrown into the high-stakes world of international cybercrime, Akuba will have to have to outmaneuver unlimited surveillance, high-tech con artists, and an international hacker kingpin if she wants to survive. Every identity has a price in Glitch Rain.

Apex Book Company

978-1-937009-38-0

Chapter 1

Akuba needs to get rid of her client’s face if she plans on living past the week.

She sees herself from above, the image floating in front of her eyes. She’s in a gondola, high above the canal. Isaac is with her.

He tweaks something on his phone. "Getting it?"

She nods. Her new airhud keeps the video in the same spot, in the upper left of her field of vision. She slides down the bench to get a look at the city’s dark skyline, making the gondola sway. They’re too far away from downtown to see any people, but the haze of drones is just visible in the fading light. The airhud puts bubbles above the buildings, recommending places she can spend her daily.

"Can’t believe you bought that thing," Isaac says with a petty grin. He told Akuba once that his teeth are so very white from sucking on sugar cane as a boy back in Gulu. He tells her lots of things. "What’s wrong with your phone?"

"I got a bunch of kiz from the last job. And it’ll be useful." It won’t really be all that useful, but that’s the kind of thing people say about money. Responsible people. And airhuds are getting so popular now. They’re not as expensive as they used to be.

Isaac sniffs. "Tell that to Shaky. He’d rather you paid him than bought yourself pretty toys." He takes her hand, pushes up the sleeve of her very flash technical jacket, and locks an unadorned black plastic bracelet around her wrist. It looks like a fitness tracker.

The video of two very stylish people sitting in a gondola shivers as a red light pops to life on the bracelet. The angle changes immediately as the passive security drone watching them moves on to other things.

"When’s he expect your next payment?" Isaac asks.

"Tomorrow. I’ll have it."

"If tonight goes okay."

"It’ll be fine," Akuba says. "See? Your drone trick is working great. It’s like I’m not even here."

The video cuts out as the drone gets too far away for Isaac’s signal. "Gonna take more than just confusing a few drones. I can’t even be sure I’ll be able to pull this off. Depends on what they’re running. Do we know where we’re going yet?"

"I’ll hear soon." He knows the drill. They’ve done this a dozen times. He’s just being nervous.

The city installed the gondolas a decade ago to show off all the new build. The clickbaiters say it’s one of the Top Twenty Urban Day-Trips You Can Make For Under Fifty Bucks, You Won’t Believe #7. They don’t say it’s one of the top twenty spots in the city to plan some crime. No sec cams up here, and the drone cover is light.

Isaac leans back and crosses his feet on Akuba’s bench. His sneaks are too old for her taste, but his pants fit well and he looks good in a track jacket. "So what happens if you’re late on a payment?"

A text comes in, sparing her from having to think too long about that. The client.

"Corner of Gwaldam and Elm," she says. "Eleven o’clock."

Isaac flicks at his phone for a few seconds. "Corp sec. Drones should be okay. Don’t know how we’re gonna get in, though."

She doesn’t know either. But she’s damn sure she has to figure it out real fast.

Sneaking around isn’t Akuba’s style. One look at her hair, cropped close to the skull and dyed a luscious lime-green, is enough to tell anyone that. But if that’s what it takes to do the job, that’s what she’ll do.

Isaac stands with his back against a concrete wall, just out of the stark pool of LED streetlamp light. This skulking shit doesn’t seem to bother him at all. He motions to the single door on this side of the building, maybe thirty feet from where they’re standing. "Figure it out yet?"

"Sure did," Akuba says. She holds up her phone and smiles. "It’s an RFID lock. And I just happen to have bought a very clever app that spoofs RFID tags."

"Nice. One problem. Can’t spoof without an active ID. Gotta have a number, right?"

"Yeah."

"And you just happen to have a badge for this place?"

She ignores the question and checks in on the image search she’s left running. A stack of jpegs is waiting for her to leaf through. Turns out this company is real proud of their employee morale program. At the last hot-dog-and-t-shirt handout event, they had the bright idea of encouraging the worker bees to take selfies and tag them with why they love their jobs. All she had to do was search for any photo location tagged around here to come up with hundreds of smiling faces. And all of those faces are wearing their corp-mandated badges. After a few minutes, she finds one that’s been flipped around. She’s done this enough to know that RFID badges usually have the number typed on the back.

"You ready?" she asks.

Isaac shrugs. "Hey, this part’s up to you."

She spoofs the door open and walks inside. The party is in full effect, people dancing and lights flashing. The oily smell of nanonarc tubes trickles up into her sinuses. All she has to do now is find her client and make sure his face is handled appropriately.

Akuba relishes the mix of anticipation and desperation as she waits for the startlingly-pale mixologist to finish making her drink. The woman’s surgical-steel tongs make the merest contact with the edges of the ice cube as she plucks it from her machine. Of course, to call the triumph of topology and thermodynamics that had just been downloaded and 3D milled for Akuba as she waited a "cube" is an insult at best.

When Akuba ordered, the pale mixo had insisted in very hushed tones that the ice designer was some ex-NASA materials chick living in Xichang who makes a little kiz on the side by drawing up custom cube shapes for parties. This little frozen lozenge was ginned up just now based on the current humidity and dew point in this place as well as the temp and viscosity of the particular brand of brandy, then popped into to the mixo’s cloud storage for her to snag and pass to her machine for production.

Akuba hates drinking slowly, but to toss back this diminutive meditation on mutability seems uncouth.

She’s had a few already, naturally. The job runs itself for the most part, and after the host put so much effort into packing as much pleasure as possible into this underused back hallway it’d be shame to waste it. Even with whatever palms the host has no doubt greased, the police will be showing up at some point to clear the city’s drunk elite from this place.

No noise complaints, though. Everyone who shows at one of these deals is their own DJ, running their personal mix from their cells to their massive headphones. It’s as quiet as a church. Or at least as quiet as Akuba assumes a church to be.

Isaac smiles as Akuba hands him his drink, a non-descript white wine in street-sign-green mug which still bears a few burrs from the printer. Any time Isaac smiles it’s a sure sign he thinks he’s the smartest person in the room.

"Tell me you didn’t believe that crap about the genius hermit ice sculptor." He keeps smiling as he sips.

She twists her glass in her hand — a real glass, oddly enough — and waits for the ice to turn. "I had to check it out at least."

"And? Does it make a difference?"

"I’ll tell you after a couple more. What’s this place again?" Akuba asks, trying to guess from the shit on the cinder block walls. Chemical safety sign from easily the seventies. Rusted bracket for a fire extinguisher. "Medical center?"

Isaac’s smile collapses, hiding his impossibly white teeth for a moment. A single precious moment before he lectures her again. "Technology incubator. Science lab. Didn’t you listen to myâ€¦."

She waves him off and slides her free hand into the pocket of her Gore-Tex tech pants to get her phone. It hasn’t buzzed, so she has nothing to worry about, but she feels she should at least pretend she’s working. And it’ll shut Isaac up.

A flick of her finger brings up her airhud, and the personal hologram shows her what kind of trouble her phone is getting to. She watches her fixer app as the little bastard does its work. Pictures of the party drizzle down the screen, each taken just now and Instagrammed. The mini-StingRay weighing down her other pocket is grabbing all the cell traffic around here and passing it through her phone before sending it off to wherever it’s meant to go. But not until her little app has a peek at it.

Most of this crowd is wearing knock-off blurred style. The kind of clothes that look like they should block facial recognition and drone tracking like the good stuff, but are much cheaper and don’t do a damn thing. Repeating patterns made from the pics of the lips and chins of celebrities. A funky make-up design clearly modified from the cover of last June’s Prevalence. A running jacket that shines like it’s cut from a signal-blocking fabric, but isn’t. Akuba’s waterfall of pictures is all bobbing headphones colored to match high-end mall clothes, and her recog app is having no trouble snagging facial IDs.

She’ll sell the attendee list later, based on those recogs. That sort of data is valuable to a certain set. And Isaac doesn’t need to know about it.

Her client isn’t here. He better not have bailed. She needs payment in full. Shaky doesn’t have a late-fee policy.

A chick in a vastly oversized black t-shirt and a Tiffany-blue headscarf upnods at Akuba and holds up her phone, offering to dance. So far only three guys and two girls have offered tonight, which is bullshit. This one’s freestyling with a very expensive turntable app, her fingertip rubbing the touchscreen as she graces Akuba with a crooked smile which promises a long weekend of delights. Her fingernails are short and perfect.

Akuba unhooks her ear goggles from her belt and teases the girl with a skeptical look. Akuba’s ear goggles are very, very nice. None of this candy-color nonsense. Audiophile-quality sound, buttery bass response, pads like a lover’s whisper. Black as a burnt iPad. Some might call it an indulgence, but she’s never gone in for the puritanical self-denial thing. You try growing up digging for screws in a mountain of e-waste, then you can tell her whether or not she deserves the finer.

She flicks to share mode and takes a step in as the girl’s mix erupts around her in dizzying binaural. Forget the job for a second and dance, damn it.

The girl changes the tempo as Akuba’s moves, shifting the tone to match her litheness as their bodies brush. She’s mixing her right into to the music, part of the performance. People around them are starting to watch, tuning in to this one-off exhibition. Akuba hopes this girl can hold her liquor.

An insistent buzz pounds her out of the delicious trance. Her fixer app. She ignores it.

A hand on her arm. Isaac tries pulls her away, out of the range of the girl’s music. She resists, but the girl gives her a smirk-smile and melts into the crowd.

Isaac waits until her headphones are off before bugging her. Ever efficient. "How’s everything going?"

He knows damn well how things are going. He got the buzz same as she did. But cams and drones are his job, faces and IDs hers. Heaven forbid he let her enjoy herself for once.

She looks — the recog spotted her client’s scruffy mug in one of the images. His mouth is open, jabbering about something Akuba presumes to be ridiculous. She approves the change, then watches as his pretentious face is scrubbed out of the photo before the image is sent on its way.

This is how she makes her daily. Cleaning the metadata to erase any evidence her clients were in a particular place at a particular time. Popular with philanderers, nanonarc buyers, and people rich enough to think everyone gives a shit where they party.

"Going fine." Akuba barely saves her drink from a #nofilter chica elbowing her way past, desperate to check the pic her friend just took before he posts it. The girl’s wearing a conservative black dress, sensible headphones, and necklace made from old first-gen Apple watches, each cycling a different porn gif over and over. A bit on the obvious side in Akuba’s opinion, but definitely memorable.

Isaac pulls a long sip of what must be fairly warm wine this point and frowns. "Good. Hope this gets busted up soon. I hate these things."

He does hate these things. After tonight, he’ll hole up in his cargo container home for a few days until he feels like himself again. Prolly best if Akuba rented a kapu for a while. Sleeping in those things feels like getting an MRI, but they’re cheap.

"Maybe you should call the cops yourself," Akuba says, kicking a discarded cup out of her way. "Flat fee. I’m done with that hourly shit."

"Maybe. Unless we can convince this guy to leave. He’s only paying us to make sure his meta never shows him being here. Any other location’s his own problem."

"Whatever. Just get me another drink."

The mood’s spoiled now, at least until Isaac returns with another infusion. She hugs a wall and narrows her vision into her airhud. Might as well scope the images a bit. See what the rich and mighty are up to. What versions of their lives they want to share. Smiling girls side-hugging. Drinks held like Olympic torches. Good sides and flattering angles.

And one Gray Man.

Her phone vibrates just as she sees him in the background of a fish-face shot. A text.

She looks up, trying to triangulate where this bastard is based on the pic. Khakis, white sneakers, basic polo. Short haircut over blue eyes and a muscled jaw. He’s looking back at her when she spots him.

Everywhere Akuba’s ever been, a Gray Man means calamity. These pricks look like they belong anywhere. High-powered office? Kid’s soccer game? Truck stop diner? Military base? Airport security? Anywhere. Hell, even a dance party. Prolly running the electric. Gray Men wear the most unassuming version of business casual male, which makes them nearly invisible. And what kind of person wants to be invisible? The kind with a concealed gun and a serious power structure behind them to justify their actions. It takes a trained eye to even notice them.

Her phone buzzes again. It’s Shaky. He never contacts her directly unless he wants something, usually to be a prick to her.

ENAZIM

Akuba How are you

AKUBA

Long time no text. What do you want?

ENAZIM

You know what I want

AKUBA

Yeah and youre getting it.

ENAZIM

Not all of it

Not fast enough

Her palm sweats against the back of her phone case. She’s made every payment on time. A quick panic attack, and she forces herself to remember that she sent the most recent one last month. The stories of what happened to people who played fast and loose with Shaky’s loan policies were a matter of urban legend. At least she hoped they were legends.

AKUBA

What do you want Shaky?

ENAZIM

The remaining balance of your loan

paid in full

One week

nonnegotiable

Please. He must be high, and looking for a dog to kick.

AKUBA

Not going to work for me Shaky.

Might be able to double up on next pay tho. Maybe next after that too.

Should I do that?

Three frustrating dots as she waits for response. The Gray Man is still looking at her.

ENAZIM

All of it One week

Don’t try to contact me.

AKUBA

Shaky.

Shaky.

Come on

shaky

The Gray Man smiles like an old friend and walks away.

A glass is in front of her, Isaac’s hand closer than she wants it to be. Than she wants anything to be.

"Your drink." That smile again. "Cube’s different. Must be getting warmer in here."

Akuba snatches the glass and downs the contents in a single burning gulp. "Let’s go."

She drops her glass and takes off, leaving Isaac to make confused noises as the glass shatters on the worn linoleum. The Gray Man headed for the exit, and so is she.

The blood has almost stopped rushing in her ears by the time she makes it out the door and into the still night. She’s breathing. Thinking. Isaac is saying something about what’s going on, the job, whatever. There’s a sign that says "Loading Dock", an over-full dumpster, and a few steel doors. A dozen cars rest in an approximate line, their solar panel hoods sipping whatever ambient light they can out of the black.

She can’t see anyone. Did he leave on foot? Did he have a car waiting?

"Akuba. Enough. Let me help."

She spins to face Isaac, not caring if her eyes are wild. She’s feeling more than a little crazy anyway. "There was a Gray Man."

"Here?"

"Yes. He was here for me."

His eyes disappear as he rubs the bridge of his nose. "Okay."

Well, at least he didn’t yell at her. "He left. We need to find him."

"Follow a Gray Man? Why?"

She doesn’t answer. He’d try to talk her out of it. Her old pal Shaky isn’t supposed to have any presence in this city. Did he hire this bastard just to scare her? Is he getting involved in the industry around here? She has to know. She needs to talk to Shaky, and he never allows anyone to initiate contact. She’s tried text harassment dozens of times with no luck. If she can get to his thug, she might be able to get a message to him. The Gray Man is the only lead she has.

One week.

The bored whirr of a hospital security drone creeps by overhead. She’s not worried. A light passes nearby by without touching them. Isaac’s in the local wifi, and the tags he and Akuba have on them are telling any drones and security cams to avert their eyes. His trick worked.

"Akuba?" Isaac presses. "What’s happening here?"

She looks up. The buzzard is painted the same rust-orange as the loading dock sign. "Can you hack that drone?"

"Of course. You know this."

"I want to see what it sees. And tell it where to fly."

"Oh," Isaac says. "That’s notâ€¦ can’t do that without more tech."

She’s moving before she realizes she wants to. Toward the road. "Well, why the hell are you here, then?"

A single car pulls out of the hospital’s ramp. A black Ford sedan, just washed. No bumper stickers or shit in the back window. Could be a cop, a limo, or no one at all.

"That’s him," Akuba hisses. "Get a car."

She tears off the tag bracelet and wings it at the windshield. It makes a satisfying clack as it hits, and the Gray Man notices Akuba for the first time. He smiles and waves, benign as a cargo-shorts dad. The tag slides down the windshield and catches in the wipers.

The car turns, and the tag clatters to the pavement. An engine murmurs to life behind her. She swears loudly.

Isaac has chosen a mid-range coupe which smells of quinine and weed. The only one he could get open, he says. Akuba knocks a 3D-printed bong the shape of an Atari controller off the passenger seat and tells him to get after the Ford.

"Trouble is the maintenance," he stammers, cranking the steering wheel. Isaac gets chatty when he’s nervous. "All these self-driving machines require firmware updates on a regular basis. They say it’s to speed up the Bluetooth or keep the iOS interfaces up to date, but really it’s to protect against the latest exploits. In the old days you could just walk through a parking lot with your phone out and have your choice, but now you have to look for someone who hasn’t kept their firmwareâ€¦."

A console politely blinks â€˜Please speak destination.’ Akuba stabs a finger at it. "What does that mean?"

"It wants to know where it’s driving us. Me too."

"We’re following that guy to wherever he’s going. After thatâ€¦ well, I haven’t figured that out yet."

Isaac’s shoulders tense and he eases off the gas a little. "That will be a problem."

"Why?"

"Self-driving, Akuba. Can’t just yell â€˜follow that car.’ It needs a destination."

"Isn’t there, like, an override or something? For emergencies?"

He points at a blinking red button. "Used that to get this far. It’s governed to just a few minutes to keep people from going rogue. These things are all talking to one big traffic-preventing AI, Akuba, like ants or bees. They pass alongâ€¦."

Akuba screams at him to shut up and holds out her phone, recording whatever video she can of the Ford as it barrels down the road, blowing vestigial red lights. Whoever this guy is, his car’s running outside the hivemind. Just the kind of Venn diagram of expensive and illegal that means real trouble to small-timers like Isaac and herself.

A klaxon, and the car slows and parks in the next available legal spot, the parking lot of an old church. As Akuba stews, Isaac gives a mini TED talk on how these things are rigged to stop when they get too far away from their owners. To prevent theft.

Alex Livingston grew up in various quiet New England towns before moving to Buffalo, NY to study English at Canisius College. His fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Bastion, Quantum Fairy Tales, Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi, and other venues. He lives in an old house with his brilliant wife and a pile of aged videogame systems. Visit him online at galaxyalex.com.

Apex Magazine Issue 82 Preview

Next month in Apex Magazine, we will have original fiction by Lavie Tidhar ("Agent of VALIS"), Jason Sanford ("Death Flowers of Never Forgotten Love"), and Travis Heermann ("Screaming Without a Mouth"). Our poetry is by Rodney Gomez, Caleb J. Oakes, Matthew Chamberlin, Annie Neugebauer ,and David Barber. The reprint will be a story by Elizabeth Bear ("Dolly"). Cover art will be by Vincent Sammy. Look for this and more in Apex Magazine issue 82, coming in March, 2016.

Copyrights and Acknowledgments

“Words from the Editor-in-Chief” Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sizemore
“The Beast at the End of Time” Copyright © 2016 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
“Interview with Author Benjanun Sriduangkaew” Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Johnson
“Anabaptist” Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Rosen
“Calabash” Copyright © 2016 by Mike Jewett
“Little and Red” Copyright © 2016 by Crystal Lynn Hilbert
“The Four Gardens of Fate” Copyright © 2016 by Betsy Phillips
“Arrhythmia” Copyright © 2016 by Heather Morris
“Paper Unicorn” Copyright © 2016 by Laurel Dixon
“On the Occasion of My Retirement” Copyright © 2014 by Nick Mamatas (Originally appeared in The Nickromonicon, Innsmouth Free Press, 2014)
“Interview with Cover Artist David Demaret” Copyright © 2016 by Russell Dickerson
“Glitch Rain (Excerpt)” Copyright © 2016 by Alex Livingston (Apex Publications, February 2016)

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief—Jason Sizemore
Managing Editor—Lesley Conner
Poetry Editor—Bianca Spriggs
Assistant Editor—Hannah Ruth Krieger

Slush Editors—Andrea Johnson, Anna Middleton, Beth Sutherland, Beverly McPherson, Carolyn Charron, Dawn Griffin, Eileen Maksym, Eliyanna Kaiser, Gabrielle Harbowy, Jessica Nelson, Joshua Cowell, Joshua P'ng, Kate Dollarhyde, Kendal Pletcher, Lauren Smith, Lia Swope Mitchell, Lindsay Anderson, Lisa Bolekaja, Mandy Johnson-Parker, Mike Baldwin, Pandalion Death, Rebecca Hurley, Reese Menezes, Samantha Williams, Stephanie Harris, and Tacoma Tomilson.

Graphic Designer—Justin Stewart

ISSN: 2157-1406

Apex Publications
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524

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