APEX MAGAZINE
ISSUE 86, JULY 2016

Jason Sizemore, Editor-In-Chief

Table of Contents

Editorial

Words from the Editor-in-Chief — Jason Sizemore

Fiction

Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix — Jennifer Giesbrecht

Starpower — Christopher Shultz

The Big Bah-Ha — C.S.E. Cooney

Nonfiction

Interview with Author Jennifer Giesbrecht — Andrea Johnson

Interview with Artist Sunny Ray — Russell Dickerson

Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe: Interview with Andrew Fazekas — Michael A. Burstein

Poetry

Canal of Mars — David Jibson

La Llorona — Rodney Gomez

Earth, Hearing Her Children Cry Out Sharp Like Broken Pottery, Shrinks — Jon Olsen

Knights of the Smooth Hull — Chris Phillips

Words from the Editor-in-Chief

Jason Sizemore

Perhaps the first thing you noticed about this issue was the striking cover art by Sunny Ray. It’s an evocative image, a young child reaching upward, painting the sky. The perfect image to set the mood for this month’s content.

Jennifer Giesbrecht’s "Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix" is a superhero tale in the classic Apex Magazine style. The Amazing Kid Phoenix has a tragic origin story (perhaps horrifying is a better description) that culminates with a fast and breathtaking conclusion. In "Starpower" by Christopher Shultz the protagonist discovers a superpower that will remind you of a punk rock version of Garth Ennis’s classic comic Preacher. I’m thrilled to be able to say C.S.E. Cooney returns to our pages with "The Big Bah-Ha." I can’t even begin to describe this one, so I’ll let the author do it:

The Big Bah-Ha is a post-apocalyptic katabasis story, complete with kiddie gangs, slingshot battles, strange clowns, Tall Ones, and one very dead (very brave) child protagonist.

She had me at "strange clowns."

Our poetry editor Bianca Spriggs has chosen the following for us this month: "Canal of Mars" by David Jibson, "La Llorona" by Rodney Gomez, "Earth, Hearing Her Children Cry Out" by Jon Olsen, and "Knights of the Smooth Hull" by Chris Phillips.

Andrea Johnson interviews Jennifer Giesbrecht about this month’s featured story. Russell Dickerson interviews cover artist Sunny Ray.

Michael A. Burstein rounds out our nonfiction selection with a discussion with Andrew Fazekas about his new book from National Geographic (yes, that National Geographic) titled Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe: The True Science Behind the Starship Voyages. Fazekas has drawn acclaim as the "Night Sky Guy" through his work with National Geographic.

Our podcast fiction this month is Giesbrecht’s "Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix." You, undoubtedly, noticed a new voice behind the podcast. Mahvesh Murad (Midnight in Karachi) takes over as our new producer and narrator. We’re incredibly excited to be working with her again. She did a wonderful job editing The Apex Book of World SF 4, and her voice work is top notch.

Apex thanks the wonderful Lisa Shininger for her hard work and contributions as our podcast producer and narrator the last two years!

Jason Sizemore

Editor-in-Chief

Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix

Jennifer Giesbrecht

7,500 words

The first thing the Old Man told me was this: "Sometimes folks just don’t die right."

So I’m gonna tell you a story about what that that means, and I want you to listen real carefully.

§

The Old Man said to me: "Sometimes they go down. Sometimes they go down, down, right down to the bottom. Right to the center of it all, but they don’t stay there. They come right back up. That’s what you done, son. You came right back up." He told me this with his cold, dusty gloves cupping either side of my face. He had to hold me down so I didn’t keep screaming or else I might have done that until I died the right way.

My skin was still charred when I first woke up. I raised my hands above my head and watched as it bubbled and leaked, as it grew pink — then brown — between the charcoal scabs. By nightfall I was covered in an armor of abscess. I spent six hours popping yellowed sacks of pus to reveal my new skin, baby-soft and unmarked.

"What do you remember?" the Old Man asked me when I could speak. My tongue was still numb from blistering, my eyes hazy and cheeks raw from where the skin had sloughed off in rubbery sheets. I didn’t remember, I tried to say. It wasn’t true — I saw glimpses of it in short, painful bursts. Tiny, knife-shaped headaches that ground through my skull like diamond. I remembered some ugly words and the grate of a lighter being clicked to life over and over again. I remembered tripping over my shoelaces and hearing a song somewhere in the distance, a hard grind of sax and bass. Funk was a false promise of kindness. Will it go ‘round in circles? Billy Preston was asking me. Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?

"I burned," I told him. "They freaking burned me. I died burning."

"A lot of things die burning," Old Man Gasper said. "But not you."

§

Before I burned, I fancied that I could have been a comic book writer. What Dad wanted for me was to go to Berkeley, like he did, and we argued so fiercely about it that it was the last thing we talked about before he went and got himself crushed on the highway by an eighteen-wheeler on the way home from a lecture. I figured at least writing comic books I’d be safe; locked inside a dusty one-room apartment eating beans out of a can.

What I liked about comics was that they only had so many pages, right? Tolstoy could write as much as he damn well wanted to tell us about War and Peace, but Stan Lee only has twenty-four pages to show us how Spider-Man learned about responsibility. When I was a kid, comics could only use four colors. That’s why Dad thought they were juvenile. He used to criticize them for being emotionally shallow, for not being able to capture anything but the broadest expression of human experience. I was too young to articulate it when he died, but what I’d tell him now is that full expression is not the point. When you can only use four colors, you choose them carefully. Distill them down to their purest and most immutable form.

That’s the argument I still have in my head with my father — that comics express the Platonic ideal of emotion. At least, that’s how I understood things at the time.

§

LAZARUS AND THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX, ISSUE #1

PAGE 1

Panel 1:

Text Box: THE CURIOUS ORIGIN OF THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX. A BOY THAT CAN BURN WITH THE HEAT OF HADES! WATCH HIM LEARN, WATCH HIM BURN, WATCH HIM BURN DOWN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD.

Panel 2: (Picture this: Chicago, 1972. It’s a dark alley on a stormy night. You know the place, man, it’s every alley in every city all over the US of A. There’s trash cans and rats with slavering mouths and giant, cartoon-red eyes. An owl hoots somewhere in the distance, a premonition. Real spooky stuff.)

Panel 3: (A kid barrels down the narrow between buildings. 5’7", skinny and knobby at the joints. About 16 years old, African-American and growing into a handsome man if you believe what his mom says (and his mom doesn’t lie). The kid’s not terrified. He’s running with purpose, because he’s being followed by villains and he’s gotta lure them into a false sense of security.)

Panel 4: (He (heroically) skids to a stop. Sound effect: SKEEEET. He wheels around — not panting, not out of breath. He’s grinning because he’s got something in store for them.)

Panel 5: (Who are they? Three shadows block the entrance of the alleyway. The second half of the panel is eaten by a gaping, plump mouth. There’s an angry gap between its front teeth, an abyss of ill intent, darker than the night.)

Panel 6: (Light spills in from the streetlamps. Our villains, illuminated: a pack of dumb looking thugs wearing matching red jackets and high-collar shirts. One has a narrow rat face, the leader is pig-nosed. He’s a clear contrast to our hero, who is clean-cut and comely with large eyes and a trustworthy smile.)

THUG: We’re gonna teach you a lesson, nerd! To show you what happens when you stand in our way!

(The leader of the pack flips out his butterfly knife and snarls.)

Panel 7: (Our hero puts his hands on his hips and stands proud. He is the single bright point in a dark, corrupt world.)

KID PHOENIX: And I’ll teach you what happens to lowlifes who try to deal drugs in my neighborhood!

Panel 8: (And aren’t they surprised when our Hero bursts into flames.)

§

Old Man Gasper was a hulking figure packed all uneven and lumpy into a canvas suit that didn’t hang right on his body. It folded backwards around the joints and bunched up over the rims of his boots and gloves. He wore a gas mask and a mining helmet and he never took them off. He left no part of himself visible to the outside world. In the evening, he sat on a milk crate and talked to me about philosophy, his harmonica grasped loosely in the open crib of his hands. We stayed in a bare room with no electricity. The dying light turned all the shadows on his body into fathomless canyons.

On the sixth day he told me — in that molasses Appalachian accent of his — about his troubles: "When I was just a bit older than you, I used to work in the mines. A lot of things go wrong down there. Already halfway to hell is what my pa used to say."

His voice evoked the image of shadows moving bent-backed through the fog. Of mist rolling down the green mountain in soft folds. Gasper sighed: "They don’t care none about what happens to a coal miner in the depths. A coal miner ain’t nobody but a coal miner’s son. When I burnt up, they just closed off the tunnel."

I tried to imagine it: the steam bursting up around him like a living thing. A beast made of translucent fang and smoke claw. Its silk tendrils slide beneath his flesh. It makes his veins snap and pop, makes the skin roil with greasy, white bubbles. The image shivered through me.

"When my body dissolved in the steam no one came back to check," he said. "I laid in the ink like one of the horrors what lives on the bottom of the ocean and never ever dreams that the sun might exist. When I crawled back into my suit, I didn’t even notice I’d changed."

It took time for me to noticed I’d changed too. On the sixth day, I looked just fine, but my bones felt like they were trying to jump out of my skin. I traced lines over my face, looking for imperfections. I’d pinch at my neck, my knees, the inseams of my elbows, any place where the skin hung loose and soft. I felt like I was something new underneath and maybe I could peel away my flesh like a sheet of cellophane.

I was scared that I really was dead and I’d turn gray and smelly like the zombies in Romero’s films. That was probably why the Old Man wouldn’t take off his mask, I decided, ‘cause he smelled like pig’s ass.

It took a week before I stubbed a bare toe on brick and got so mad that I burst into flame. Blew the windows right out of the abandoned apartment we were staying in and stained all the walls with soot-shadows. Ashy firebirds with jagged, angry wings.

Old Man Gasper wasn’t even upset. He just took off one of his big, leather gloves and showed me how there was nothing underneath but tendrils of pale, smoky film. He had no hands. He had no body. Gasper hadn’t just died in the steam, he’d become it.

"When it first happened to me I had this fear that God didn’t want me," Gasper said calmly. "Then I thought about it even more and got afeared that the Devil didn’t want me neither. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done in this life to make both the Devil and the Lord too mad to look me in the eyes."

He took off his mask to show me that it was hollow as well.

"Well, yeah, sure they don’t want to look in your eyes," I joked. "I mean, man, come on — you don’t even have eyes anymore."

He laughed and an involuntary shudder rocked right through me; the man I was talking to, he had no mouth, no throat, no body to make that noise. His shape was only human because something in the steam remembered what it was like to be shaped like a human. It was as close to having a conversation with a man’s soul as anyone ever got.

Gasper leaned forward — the elbows of the empty jacket settling on rubber knees in a motion that was driven by pure force of nostalgia. "The flames gave you another life, son. I’m going to show you what we do with it.

§

LAZARUS AND THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX, ISSUE #3

PAGE 1

Panel 1: (Our heroes stand on a roof, vigilant. The night sky is dark, but their silhouettes are made bright by the light of a dollar-coin moon.)

Text Box: LAZARUS AND HIS AMAZING SIDEKICK, KID PHOENIX, HIT THE MEAN CHICAGO STREETS TO BUST UP ITS MOST NEFARIOUS CRIMINALS AND GANGBANGERS!

Panel 2: (Lazarus is chasing down a thief. You know that it’s a thief ‘cause he’s clutching a purse to his chest like it’s a baby. Lazarus’s arms extend as smoke from the confines of his suit. His hands look like fluffy clouds as they wrap around the thief’s ankle.)

LAZARUS: Halt!

Panel 3: (The thief has toppled over! He crumples against a brick wall with his tongue lolling out of a dog-like mouth.)

Panel 4: (Lazarus — ever the kindly and soft old man — holds the purse up triumphantly. His gas mask is twisted in a big ol’ grin.)

LAZARUS: Tsk, tsk, tsk. Didn’t you know: pearls before swine is just a turn of phrase!

(Kid Phoenix arrives on the scene, his eyes glittering with red fire.)

KID PHOENIX: Golly gee, Lazarus. I guess he better stick to ham sandwiches from now on!

Panel 5: (Lazarus claps his kid sidekick on the shoulder, like a proud father.)

LAZARUS: He’ll get all the ham he can eat at the state penitentiary!

§

The Old Man only had a few possessions. He had a set of encyclopedias, 1968 edition. He had a harmonica and he grew plants. He said that he liked plants because the Egyptians used a germinating seed to represent the rebirth of Osiris. I didn’t even know what Osiris was. I was more interested in his fourth hobby, which was sitting on a roof at dusk and looking for trouble.

"You only take a crime within five city blocks of where we’re staying, and never one out in the open." He told me the rules, counting them on his fingers one by one. "Never one where you’ll be spotted, or one that you think the police will attend to. And you don’t take one where the criminals are kids, or they look wretched."

"This is so cool," I said. "It’s like we’re Batman and Robin."

The Old Man stared at me, silent, vapor curling quizzically in the eyes of his mask.

"You gotta be kidding me, you’ve never heard of Batman." I snorted. "Of course, you were born in what, 1750?"

"1882," Gasper corrected.

"So, if you’ve never read Batman, why do you do this?"

The Old Man was quiet a moment. "I didn’t at first," he said.

"What made you start?"

"I met a lady, one like us, only she were worse done by it."

"How do you get worse done by than burnt to death?"

Gasper set his palm on my head. "Well, son, her husband beat her so bad that when he was done with her she looked like a sack of meat with no shape."

I could feel him trembling through the glove. My imagination, I guessed, because the Old Man didn’t have the flesh or the muscles or the nervous system to quake from any emotion at all. It was probably me who was shaking.

"He dumped her in a quarry afterward and she laid there a week in the Arizona sun. Then she came back up and looked at her reflection in the water. You want to know what she told me she saw?"

I leaned forward and propped my elbows up on the lip of the building. It didn’t hurt anymore to grind my skin between brick and bone. "A lady with her head caved in?"

Gasper shook his head.

"No, because my lady friend, her head didn’t stay caved. Where she got hit, she grew a new bone where there wasn’t bone before. That’s what she looked like — six joints in her arm, armour made of teeth coverin’ her face. She was magnificent. She said to me: ‘God wants you.’ She said: ‘God wants us more n’ ever.’ She believed that so sure that she gored six men to death in just the first month after she came back up. What she saw in the water, she said, was an angel."

"What happened to her."

Gasper said nothing.

I was filling up inside, welling with a strange anxiety like the sky was getting bigger all around me but I just kept shrinking until I was too small to even comprehend the stars. I asked: "Did you see her again, then?"

"No." Gasper answered.

"So, what? We do it ‘cause God wants us to? Like your lady friend said?"

"Son," the Old Man said solemnly, "God doesn’t exist. But we do, and so did she. Now, watch carefully."

§

What Old Man Gasper did was that he creeped right into a man’s throat and held onto it gently. The man we got, he’d cornered a woman like a wolf corners prey, like a sheepdog herds ewes. He had her flat against the brick with a snarl and something clenched between his fingers that glittered in the streetlight.

The Old Man said to me: "Shhh," and he seeped from the gaps in his coat, from the muzzle of his mask. He snaked through the night air, a quivering ribbon of silver, leaving his boots and coat and shroud deflated in a pile at my side. The man breathed him in without even knowing it. The Old Man became a hitch in his throat and the criminal pawed desperately at the skin of his neck as heat poured down his esophagus.

Old Man Gasper asphyxiated the man slowly, gently. Carefully. Filled his throat and his nose and his lungs just long enough to interrupt respiration. The man folded in on himself, crumpled right in front of his victim, limbs all crooked.

"She never knew a thing happened," I whispered when the Old Man got back. She pulled her jacket tight around her and fled. I looked at my own hands, turned the flame on and watched the dirt burn off, felt strangely cool inside the cage of immolation. The fever burning in my chest was a comfort, the spark between my teeth a power.

"I couldn’t do that," I said. "I couldn’t do it so that no one knew a thing happened."

"We’ll figure it out," the Old Man said. He was confident. He always sounded confident, probably since he was nearly a century old.

I spent the next week on the roofs, watching. The Old Man had a system, but he was so cautious. He was cautious in a way that made my bones rattle and my nerves go taut all around my joints. Gasper did small deeds, saved small people. I had fingers that could turn into tendrils of heat, a heart that was newly molten at its core.

"I could just burn the whole thing down," I told him one night.

"What would be the point?"

"The whole wicked place. I could find the fuckers that burned me and I could burn all their shit down, Old Timer. I could do it."

"And would that bring your mother peace?"

I went to my place sometimes, got up on the fire escape and pressed my hands to the window, trying to catch of glance of Mom and my brothers. I always played it safe. Never stayed long enough to see a smile or a sob. To see if Mom’s hands were shaking. It was too soon, I knew, too soon after Dad for me to have died too. The Old Man said I could go back if I wanted, but it was impossible. I’d been all the way down, right down to the bottom. You can’t look your mother in the eye after you’ve seen the bottom of the world.

What was I supposed to say to her? "Oh hi Mom. Just so you know, the world is a vast, dark and Godless place. It’s brutal and violent and I just want to set fire to the foundations. I want to dive beneath the Earth’s crust and shake up the magma until it pops through the pores of the planet and we all burn together." That’s how it felt. I was scared that if I looked her in the eye, that’s what I would have said.

"Sorry, Ma’," I’d say to her, my hands turned to flame. "I guess I’m a monster now."

Instead I began to read the encyclopedias. I’d set two beside me and read them front to back in a day. I’d never known I could read so fast before I had a literal flame burning at my back.

"Lazarus," I said, my finger on the name. "Lazarus and Kid Phoenix."

"Hmm?" the Old Man wheezed between broken harmonica notes.

"They’re our names, Old Timer. You spent three days dead in a cave and I was born in the flame."

"Lazarus spent four days dead, son. I don’t get where you’re going with this metaphor."

"It’s not a metaphor, it’s our Hero Names."

"Like Batman and Robin?" he asked.

I snapped the book shut and laughed. "Only better. Batman ain’t got powers, man."

§

But I could, you know. I could do it easily. I could burn everything. That’s what I thought.

And why shouldn’t I have? It hurt, sometimes, to bottle it. To feign ignorance. It put a crack in me. It put a crack in everything.

§

LAZARUS AND THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX, ISSUE #24

PAGE 7

Panel 1: (The body tumbles through the rough underbrush. She’s wearing a powder blue dress, dappled gently in polka dot and ruffle. It holds the shape of her doughy body. It is loyal to the memory of her curves and dips.)

Panel 2: (The murderous husband walks away. In his shadow, we see her hand resting lifeless in the yellow grass. It is puffy, puckered purple with thick, dark bruises. One of her fingernails is missing, the others bent and splintered. Her nail polish is still immaculate.)

Panel 3: (She lays beneath the sun and it bakes her rotting flesh. Flies find a home in her nostrils. She goes down, all the way down, right to the bottom —)

PAGE 9

Panel 4: (— she looks in the water. The wind makes ripples that obscure her features. At first, the reader will think that the reflection is a lie, that she has awoken whole, that a good woman like her will be given a second chance.)

Panel 5: (The water stills. The sun burns behind her and the anger burns inside her. She no longer lives inside soft, mortal skin. She lives inside a cage of bone, a suit of armor. She is reborn a warrior.)

PAGE 20

Panel 1: (When she smiles, her teeth grind together. But she does smile.)

HER: Gasper, you are a sweet man, but you're milk soft.

Panel 2: (Gasper’s lady friend has a vicious mouth. Her blue eyes are buried inside a skull that’s overflowed through the skin. Her face is a mask of teeth. Rows and rows of them, tumbling over each other as they splinter from the trauma of growing too close together. There are molar roots peeking through the fray; tiny, white devil horns to pierce the skin of any man stupid enough to hit her again.)

HER: God wants you. God wants us more than ever.

Panel 3: (She fans out her hands. They have too many fingers. Try to count them: seven, nine, twelve, too many. Enough, she once told Gasper. Enough for her new purpose.)

HER: What does Isaiah say about the Seraphim, Mister Gasper?

Panel 4: (Her fingers become wings. The teeth along her cheekbone sprout feathers inlaid with a thousand eyes.)

HER: He said that they were horrors, and that they hurt him to look at.

Panel 5: (Inside her eyes burns a wheel of fire. I’m watching in a dream. I look at my hands — at the fire that webs between my fingers — and I shudder.)

HER: He said that they were born in flame.

Panel 6: (She stands on a hill and watches the sun set. The Old Man describes her like this: that despite the horror and the bloat of her body, she was still beautiful. There is a purity about her, as if she is haloed by the blood she’s spilled. A polka-dot dress sways around her elephant knees. She spreads her arms and lets the Lord’s light shine down on her. The horizon ignites.)

HER: I am a Horror, Mister Gasper. I am an avenging angel.

§

Gasper and I ran down cutpurses, but we stole hot dogs. When I asked him why, he said: "I don’t believe in money. When I was a boy, we didn’t pay for food. We ate our own chickens. It’s sick to make a man pay for food."

"I wouldn’t have taken you for a Marxist." I laughed, because my dad was a Marxist too. Whenever he got raving, my mom rolled up the newspaper and whapped him on the back of the head. She told him to be practical because: Wouldn’t it be nice to own a dishwasher someday, Marshall?

"I never thought about it that way before. I just don’t think it’s right."

"Hey — you were alive when Marx was alive, weren’t you?"

"Only for a year. Don’t think that counts. Besides," Gasper chuckled cryptically, " ‘The past is a foreign country’."

"Still, it’s wild. Give me a high five, man."

"Kid, I ain't got no hands, remember?"

We spent a cozy six months like that. It was glorious, let me tell you, the way I would ring the street in these teeny, tiny fires, like the kind you think you’re so bold for setting with toy pistol caps. I set fire to their shoes. Once, I got naughty and ruined some carjacker’s leather coat. Only the cuffs, though. Wouldn’t have wanted to get extreme or anything.

The Old Man was kind with me, but he muzzled my potential. He put a cap over my steam engine and the pressure, it just built and built and —

"— are you listening?"

I grit my teeth and dug my nose deep into my comic. I was getting an earful about the jacket. "I bet Batman never lectures Robin like this." I turned the page noisily.

The Old Man’s expressions were pretty easy to read: the whole suit shifted from one side to the other when he was pleased. Smoke flickered in his goggles when he was concerned. I sometimes wondered what he’d been like as a whole person. Craggy and toothless and southern, I figured. He hadn’t been educated until after he died. It gave him a strange manner: a hillbilly mouth with a post-Civil Rights demeanor. He pitched forward and snatched the comic book from my hands. Who did he think he was? My dad?

Yeah, right. My dad never let me read comic books. He’d have me reading Plato or Descartes or something. You have to work harder than your friends, he always told me. He never said why out loud, even though we both knew. We just weren’t that kind of household.

Gasper began flipping through the comic. "I don’t think I like Batman very much."

"Dude," I grabbed it back. "Who doesn’t like Batman? He’s right up your alley, Old Man. Doesn’t kill the crooks, not even the really bad ones."

"He’s got too much money," Gasper said. "I don’t trust men with money." He paused, then added: "Robin don’t look much like you either."

Did he really have to point it out like I didn’t see it everywhere I looked? "Yeah, well. That’s why when I grow up, I’m gonna write comics." I folded the pages open and touched the soft newsprint. "I’ll write one for you, Mister Gasper: hillbilly Batman and black Robin. Would that make you happy?"

Gasper didn’t reply.

"Or maybe we can go collect your lady friend. Recruit a new guy who died in a glue accident or something. Make our very own Fantastic Four. Our very own happy family of freaks."

"Hmm," is all he said. He sat down on his milk crate and retreated inside the suit. I couldn’t tell what the fuck he was on about. I hopped up and stretched out my knobby limbs. I paced the length of the warehouse and fumed.

There was a feeling I had, a thing that needed doing. Something I had to do or my bones were going to char themselves into ash.

§

LAZARUS AND THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX, ISSUE #4

PAGE 1

Panel 1: (A bank robbery in progress! The Kid Phoenix arrives and assures the bank tellers that he has the situation under control!)

KID PHOENIX: Have no fear, Kid Phoenix is here! I’ll stop those dastardly crooks using the oldest of all man’s superpowers … the power of FIRE!

Panel 2: (The robbers are already inside the vault, stuffing their greedy suitcases with cash! The head crook is dressed in a gray, pinstripe suit with a blue ascot — the very image of capitalist scum.)

Text Box: THINKING FAST, THE KID PHOENIX FORMULATES A PLAN!

Panel 3: (Kid Phoenix slams the vault door shut and presses his burning hands to the metal.)

Text Box: USING THE POWER OF CONVECTION, THE KID PHOENIX BEGINS TO HEAT THE VAULT LIKE AN OVEN!

(The metal begins to turn red under his hands. His palms breathe heat.)

KID PHOENIX: Sorry folks, but it’s about the get awfully hot in there! If I were you, I’d surrender!

Panel 4: (Inside the vault, the criminals are sweating. The walls are red and pulsing, but the worst they’ll suffer is the effects of an overzealous sauna. Kid Phoenix’s flames merely tickle. It’s not like he could actually kill anyone!)

Text Box: THANKS TO THE KID PHOENIX’S AMAZING INGENUITY, THE CROOKS ARE GIVEN LITTLE CHOICE … WHAT INCREDIBLE FEAT WILL HE ACCOMPLISH NEXT!

PAGE 2

Panel 1: (The Kid Phoenix reunites with Lazarus on a rooftop. They bump fists in solidarity, a symbol of their partnership.)

LAZARUS: Where to next, chum?

Panel 2: (Kid Phoenix has one foot on the lip of the roof. He looks like a very noble gargoyle, awash in the colors of the sun.)

KID PHOENIX: Wherever there are women crying and babies who need their candy back! We’ll go —

Panel 3: (Something catches his attention. His eyes flicker dark. They go bottomless.)

(What he sees: a boy leaning a girl against the wall, laughing into her mouth. They share a joint, passing it back and forth as they snicker at some private joke. The colour and light drains out of the world. Why were you drawing this as if it were midday, you dumb-ass? Something like this could only happen at night. Kid Phoenix and Lazarus are monsters who hide during the day.)

Panel 4: (The boy is blond and fresh-faced. His lips pucker thick and pink beneath a light dusting of orange freckles. He’s cute, the girls say. He wears his hair in feathers, like Robert Plant. His hand nudges under the girl’s skirt and traces the curve of her buttocks. She throws her head back and giggles. They’re happy. Just two kids messing around under a streetlamp.)

KID PHOENIX: … motherfucker.

PAGE 3

Panel 1: (Kid Phoenix makes fists and digs his nails right into the skin. He draws them along the shallow ridges etched into his palm from a short, uneventful life. Just two kids messing around under a streetlamp, not a care in the fucking world. No one passing by would guess that one of them is a goddamned murderer.)

Panel 2: (And so the Kid Phoenix begins to move. He dashes for the fire escape. He’s gonna burn the fucker until he’s just a stain on the wall.)

(Lazarus grabs him by the arm. Jerks him back, turns him around so they’re staring at each other in the black of the night)

LAZARUS: Don’t.

Panel 3:

(Kid Phoenix is breathless with anger, confusion and fear. How dare you deny him this!?)

KID PHOENIX: I have to.

(Lazarus doesn’t let him go. He holds him so tight that steam crawls out between the seams in his gloves. He doesn’t understand. He wasn’t murdered, not like Kid Phoenix. Not like his old Lady Friend. Gasper died alone in the dark. No one meant for him to die. Kid Phoenix spits.)

KID PHOENIX: Fuck you, Old Man. I have to.

Panel 4: (Lazarus lets him go and holds out his hand.)

LAZARUS: Promise me you won’t.

Panel 5: (Like all children, Kid Phoenix knows that the only way he can be free is by lying. Like a dog chewing off its own leg to escape a trap, the Kid Phoenix lies, he lies, he lies. The lies burn beneath his skin, white as a supernova.)

KID PHOENIX: If that’s what you want, Old Timer.

§

I stalked my murderer down the way he’d stalked me.

No, that’s not right. He yanked me out of a burger joint by the scruff of my jacket. When I stalked him, I did it methodically. I learned his habits and his hangouts. I learned the best time to find him alone.

"You’re not still thinking about it, are you?" the Old Man asked me. He asked me three times over two weeks and each time I smiled at him, white teeth all a glimmer. I looked so honest in my mind’s eye. I really thought I had fooled him.

The night I planned to do it I swept into our warehouse, a sulfur tornado of fury and purpose. I grabbed my jacket and a lighter. I grabbed my book bag and stuffed it full of comics and encyclopedias because I guessed that the Old Man would never let me come home after what I was planning to do. His suit — slumped in the corner where I’d left it — came to life as I zipped the bag up.

He said my name and I snapped, straight backed, to attention.

"Don’t go back out," he said firmly. I bit my lip to stop myself from saying something I’d regret. Then I un-bit and said it anyway.

"You’re not my keeper, Old Man. Mind your own fucking business."

He rose a limb at a time. The pieces of his suit didn’t always move in concert with each other, especially not when he was upset.

"I’m telling you now, son, that you should really reconsider your course of action."

I let the bag fall from my hands. I let it fall because my palms had turned to flame and angry as I was, I really didn’t want to burn the Old Man’s copy of Encyclopedia Britannica Vol. XXII. My breath caught hard in my throat as I pieced it together: he’d followed me. The flames climbed up my arms, swirled under my armpits, crawled out from the shell of my ear and whispered against my temple.

"You trying to tell me what to do, Old Man?" I ground out slowly. "You wanna tell me what I can and can’t do with my anger?"

Gasper was so calm that it made my eyeballs pop from the heat. "I just want you to stop. Just for a breath, now, son, and I want you to think."

"I am thinking, motherfucker!"

"No, you’re feeling."

"Yeah, feeling kind of betrayed. You were spying on me! You don’t trust me"

"It ain’t like that."

"Then what is like!?" I shouted. My tongue was a curl of red lead. I burst open the seams of my own body. The fire tore through me, crumbled my skeleton and dissolved my flesh in a moment of white hot blistering revelation. I unfolded like a lotus. Seared the encyclopedias, peeled out the windows and engulfed the warehouse we lived in inside a cocoon of flame before collapsing in on myself like a dwarf star, recomposing my shape from muscle memory. I gasped greedily, sucked all the oxygen I could and rekindled the heat that was eating my heart alive. I’d never felt so fucking alive.

Gasper took a step forward and seeped through the seams of his suit. "Son," he said softly, "Kid, you …"

"Always ‘Son’ this, ‘Kid’ that," I hissed. "Call me boy, you fucker. Come the fuck on. I know you want to."

Gasper held up his hand and cocked his head towards me, as if I should hold up mine as well. I did so, begrudgingly, because I was the kind of kid who always listened to adults. Then I saw what he saw: my left index finger no longer existed. It was simply gone, replaced by just the thinnest haze of heat. I stared at it dumbly.

The Old Man unhooked his coat. He unspooled the thick, rotten leather in one heavy click and let the front fall open. The inside was the colour of rust, or dried blood. The atrium of his coat was not empty.

There was something at the center of him, suspended by the steam and pulsing gently in the scorched air. A tangle of capillary veins, a spiderwebbing of tense, quivering nerve clusters. All that was left of Old Man Gasper.

"It doesn’t last forever," he said. "Don’t know that I’d be trying to keep you here so desperately if it did."

I shook my head, numb with denial, still staring at my own hand.

"We all wake up whole, son. And we all wake up angry."

I went anyway.

§

LAZARUS AND THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX, ISSUE #1

(SECOND DRAFT)

PAGE 1

Panel 1: (We paint a romantic picture because it plays well with kids. A more accurate drawing dilutes the focus, it confuses the narrative. This alley is a different kind of dirty. A garbage bag has split open, spilling coffee grinds, rotten hamburger, cigarettes, a used needle. Our hero is on the ground, his wrists bound with a telephone wire.)

Panel 2: (The boy with the lighter kicks him twice in the gut. Calls him a word that the guys down at the Comics Code Authority aren’t gonna approve no matter how many asterisks you put after that ‘N’.)

BOY WITH THE LIGHTER: Fucking punk. Man, what made you think you could deal in our neighborhood?"

(He didn’t. He didn’t think that at all. Our hero wasn’t even dealing, kids, you have to believe him. Yeah, he sold a few grams to a friend of a friend becauseb… fuck, who knows why he did it? Isn’t everyone doing that shit these days? Because he’ll never be 6’1" like his dad was? Because his marks are good enough to do what his parents want him to do, but he wanted to try something different. He wants to be cool. What the fuck even is "cool"? He just turned seventeen a week ago.)

Panel 3: (One of the gang grounds the hero’s face into the cement with his boot.)

THUG: Was it worth it, cocksucker?

HERO (ME): L-look, this is a mi-misunderstanding. I —

Panel 4: (They begin dousing him in kerosene. Oh god, oh god. They won’t really do it. Some of these kids are middle class, they have reputations to save. They’re just trying to scare me, they wouldn’t really —)

ME: P-please, my M-mom’s expecting me home. She’ll … she’ll call the police if I’m late. I —

PAGE 2

Panel 1: (The hero’s mouth fills with gas. That shuts him up. If I were white, they’d just have some fun kicking me until my teeth came out. Like, they’d beat me so I walked funny. I could deal with that. The hero opens his mouth to beg them to beat him, but the gas is in his lungs. He coughs and spits.)

Panel 2: (The leader flicks his lighter on. The grind of the flint is like a clap of thunder. CLICK, CLACK, CLICK. He is all shadows. Only the white of his eyes and his gap-toothed grin are lit by the flame.)

THE BOY WITH THE LIGHTER: Boom.

Panel 3: (He lights me up and I scream and I scream and I go down, all the way to the bottom.)

§

I tucked myself in a dark corner and waited, arms crossed and my thumb held up in the universal symbol for ‘good luck’. I flicked the tip of it on and off like a lighter and tried not to think about what was missing from my other hand. I was already coiled up bright and mad when he rounded the corner.

"Hey man," I sauntered out of my monster’s hidey-hole, feeling fifteen feet tall, "remember me?"

He didn’t. Not immediately. He had to squint and look me up and down twice.

"Are you fucking kidding me!?" The rage stung the pads of my fingers and steamed out through my pores. "How many black kids have you iced that you can’t even remember the face of someone you burned to death?"

Recognition clicked into place and his features lined up to make the perfect picture of panic. He licked his lips dry in the rising heat and readjusted the collar of his pressed, salmon shirt. All he could say was: "Oh."

Yeah, I could taste his fear. It wasn’t sweet. It was kind of dull, not even bitter. My anger was a better flavor: molten metal, searing my tongue with the sting of a thousand and one spices. I began to glow like a piece of heated copper. My veins turned neon carmine beneath my skin.

He — my murderer — took a step back. My flames licked at the heels of his boots. Soon, they’d be licking at his face. Licking down the walls of his esophagus. I’d dive down his throat and crumble him to ash from the inside out like a demented lover’s kiss. I’d curdle him like milk.

And then I’d keep going. I’d spread my Phoenix Wings until they embraced the entire fucking city. I knew that I could. I felt it inside of me, quiet and self-assured, a radioactive core of bright and terrible possibility. I was gonna burn him down, and then I’d burn the city, the state, the whole goddamn world. Burn and burn and burn until I stopped, until I couldn’t burn anymore. Until there was nothing left.

My murderer opened his mouth to scream, to plea, to beg, to call me that fucking word again. I waited, a single, bright boiling point at the center of the world, simmering patiently as I waited for him to waste his last breath. Waited and waited.

All that came out was an aching, rattling howl. Two thin ribbons of steam came crawling out from his nostrils. His eyes rolled back and he fell over, dead. Suffocated from the inside out.

I was so incandescent with rage that it took me a minute to realize what the old man had done. He hadn't listened to me. He'd stolen my revenge. He'd saved my life. He'd killed a kid.

I toed the boy over and watched the last bit of steam roll out from his mouth. It dissipated in the evening air, used up. Gone forever. "You stubborn asshole," I whispered. "I told you not to follow me around."

Old Man Gasper did not answer.

§

LAZARUS AND THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX, ISSUE #25

PAGE 24

Panel 1: (Our hero stumbles out into the street, dazed and drunk off emotion. He sees the familiar suit, crumpled in a lifeless heap in the middle of the road. He falls to his knees and pats it down, desperate. There is nothing inside.)

Panel 2: (It’s empty for real this time. It will be empty until the end of time.)

KID PHOENIX: It doesn’t last forever.

Panel 3: (The Kid Phoenix lifts Lazarus’s mask and holds it up to the light. He looks at it for a long time before laying it back down in the street. He leaves it there as a memorial, all that is left of Old Man Gasper.)

§

I wish I could tell you that I never killed anyone, but that just isn’t true. It’s the furthest thing from truth I could tell you.

I mean, I’m not even certain that’s what the Old Man was trying to tell me. So yeah, I burned a few people in my time. But I learned that fire has other uses.

You know that the only reason we have civilization is because of fire, right? Fire is the reason we don’t fear the night, and it’s the reason we can live wherever we want. Fire is used to build every single piece of a watch. The immutable form of heat is not destruction, it’s creation. It’s a creature that can hold you with both hands.

I don’t know why I came back. It doesn't matter if I tell the story in four colors, or in four hundred, I always arrive at the same place.

And that’s where you come in.

§

LAZARUS AND THE AMAZING KID PHOENIX, ISSUE #??

THE LAST PAGE

The Last Panel: (You, a tiny ragged girl with a knife-chopped haircut. When I saw you first, you were huddled beneath the black skeleton of your home. Your parents were pillars of ash. You are small and angry.)

YOU: You want me to act like nothing ever happened?

ME: No. But you should know it won’t last forever.

YOU: You never explained why we come back.

ME: That’s because I don’t think it matters.

YOU: He died for you. Are you trying to be like him? It won't change anything.

ME: I know that. I've kept you warm because I want to.

(You are warming your hands over a dying fire. The flame sputters, chokes into embers. My voice is soft now.)

ME: Fire has so many uses.

(You lean in close. The fire is a whisper.)

ME: It can be used to keep a single person warm, down here at the bottom. Until they come back up.

(The embers cool. There is nothing left of them. They are cold and gone forever. You hold your hands in front of you and shiver as a salty, winter wind washes through you. This is the last time you will ever be cold. You take a deep breath and gather your courage.)

(You come back up.)

Jennifer Giesbrecht is a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia where she earned her degree in History and Methodology. She’s a freelance editor, multi-disciplinary nerd, and a graduate of Clarion West’s 2013 class. Her work has previously appeared in Nightmare Magazine, XIII: ‘Stories of Resurrection’, and Imaginarium 3.

Interview with Author Jennifer Giesbrecht

Andrea Johnson

I have a confession to make. Ready? My confession is that I’m not into American superhero movies or comics. I never got into Iron Man, I only watched Thorand X-Menfor the handsome actors, I could care less about The Fantastic Four or the Avengers or Superman. Even the darker stories like Watchmen didn’t do much for me. There’s something about the whole American style comic book superhero genre that I’m just not groking. There, I’ve admitted it!

Good thing Jennifer Giesbrecht’s story "Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix" came along. The first thing that grabbed me about this story was the discussion of the limitations of comic book art. You only have so many colors, you only have so many pages, and so much space on each page. Every word, every dialog bubble has to count. Superheroes may have incredible powers and strength, but the comic book lens by which we see them is built around severe limitations. Giesbrecht plays with those limitations, poking at reader expectations, making you think about what you’re reading, and telling parts of the story in a traditional method, and other parts as the story board of panels in different issues of a comic book. By switching the presentation style, she switches what the reader is "supposed" to see. Go read the story if you haven’t already, and you’ll see what I mean. And if you’re like me, and you hear "superhero story," and immediately think a story isn’t for you, then you should absolutely go read this story, because it is exactly for you.

Like Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, "Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix" is so much more than just "a comic book story," opening my eyes to what is happening behind the pages of a comic book, what the characters are going through when they think, or hope, no one is watching, how what we see on the pages of a comic book isn’t always what the characters are truly experiencing. I really love this story, and I’m so thrilled to see it in the pages of Apex Magazine. I may not be a huge comic book or superhero fan, but I sure am a huge fan of how Giesbrecht tells a story about reluctant superheroes.

Jennifer Giesbrecht attended Clarion West in 2013, and her fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, XIII: ‘Stories of Resurrection’, and Imaginarium 3. She was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about how this story came to be, the intense rush of writing the original version of story over only two days, communicating through comic book tropes, telling stories through art, the draw of stories about power and powerlessness, getting to meet her author heroes, and more.

I need to amend what I said earlier. Because thinking Iron Man or Superman stories are the only way to tell a superhero story is like saying Sailor Moon is all there is to manga or anime. And I do own the entire run of Fullmetal Alchemist. Maybe I’ve just now figured it out: superhero stories aren’t a genre, they’re a medium. They aren’t stories so much as a vehicle for telling a story.

APEX MAGAZINE: You’ve done an amazing job of mashing up traditional short story fiction with comic book story boarding. What’s your connection to comics and comic book creation?

JENNIFER GIESBRECHT: I’ve been reading comics all my life: indie, autobiographical, newspaper, shounen and shoujo and josei and seinen manga, horror, underground, web, local, romance and, of course, superhero … name any genre of comic and I’ve probably at the very least read the "greats," the cream of the crop. Comics are a great medium for telling a story because they combine some of the most interesting parts of filmmaking with the absolute most fun parts of novel writing. But it’s always superhero comics that I’ve had the most … torrid relationship with.

I’ve got a stack of long boxes in my room to hold my hundreds and hundreds of single issue "cape" books, but I go through weird cycles with it because — let’s be honest — superhero comics as they’ve been commonly written are an inherently pseudo-fascist concept and sometimes my suspension of disbelief cracks and I swear off the whole genre for years at a time. Superhero comics were really the first great fictional love of mine where I had to confront the idea that I could enjoy something that I was politically opposed to, the first thing that helped me identify that little pinch in the back of my brain that made me uncomfortable while reading something, and what that discomfort was. In that sense, superhero comics will always hold a special place in my heart because not only are they home to some of my favorite characters of all time, they also taught me an important lesson about how to critically engage with media.

Not that this story was my attempt to write a superhero story that agreed with my political sensibilities. I didn’t once actively think about politics while crafting and writing this "Amazing Tale," but I do think that it’s important background noise to the story that eventually emerged. My direct connection to comics is that I’m a writer who also draws. Not well, mind you, but like all writers with even a small drop of artistic talent, sometimes I fantasize about making comics while doing my groceries (and I have worked on one or two — writing and panel layouts — with artist friends). I storyboard important scenes from my writing sometimes for fun, I write my action scenes in point-by-panel format before delving in and putting them in prose. When I imagine my writing visually, it’s more like a comic than a movie: static scenes that have to make a big impression, to effortlessly combine action, atmosphere, and symbolism in a single, fluid stroke of the pen. The play of light and dark, a strategic splash of color, a single gesture that says it all … these are the things that comics taught me how to do that novels did not.

AM: Something I really loved about this story is that the discussion of how the limits of comic books make them the ultimate challenge in creativity. You only have so many pages, you only have so many colors, so every image, every square centimeter has to count. Poetry and short stories can be looked at in a similar way, when compared to novel writing — a novel basically has no limits, but short stories and poetry (and comics!) have very specific limitations. When you were crafting this story, were there certain limits you set for yourself? How do setting limits change your creative process?

JG: The limits I set for myself writing this story is that I had to do it in two days because I wrote this story during Clarion, and the version I originally turned into my class was 9,000 words!!!

But seriously, I actually have a set of cheesy metaphors I use on people when I’m editing for them about how different kinds of writing require very different approaches. Poetry is like painting, short stories are often like telling a very elaborate joke, pastiche is like street performance, and writing a novel is like building a whole damn house, from the architectural concept to laying the last brick. When it comes to my own writing, I don’t really think much about these kind of limitations: I just sit down to write and either it comes together, or it doesn’t. If the individual ideas are sound, the structure will be sound, I find. You discover a lot about a story after you’ve written it.

However, I did think a lot about those limitations when considering how the narrator approached his own story. He extols the structural virtue of 4-colour emotions, but the width and breadth of his own horrifying experience is constantly testing the limitations of the form. He cannot compartmentalize the emotion into tidy panels: his script begins as childish when he’s distancing himself from the pain, then shifts to an artistically rich proof (probably his natural writing style) that’s trembling at the edges and, finally, warps into twisted, undrawable images when he’s overwhelmed by the reality of his situation. There’s this romanticizing of artistic pain — as if the "best" and "purest" art is born from pain, but in reality good art tends to be born from the processing of pain.

The challenge of an artist is to take a projection of an emotion or experience that has been (we hope) universalized and, to some extent, flattened, and hold it up like a mirror that can be walked through. With poetry, or painting, or comics, the choices made during that flattening process need to be more careful, more deliberate. Not to say that novels aren’t full of very tidy, deliberate strokes, but you definitely have more space to breathe when piecing together the temporary illusion of 3-dimensional verisimilitude. This story has a more condensed form of storytelling nestled inside a much broader form in order to show the process of trauma and grief.

Author’s depiction of Lazarus from "Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix"

AM: Lazarus and Kid Phoenix came into their current "careers" from very different situations. What can you tell us about how their characters came into being? Lazarus especially has such a fascinating backstory and appearance. What inspired their personalities and backstories?

JG: As soon as I knew what time period they were born into, and the year that they died, the characters in this story — as most good characters do — sprung into my mind fully formed. Each of the resurrected "superheroes" we see in this story represent almost a zeitgeist of social injustice particular to their time and place. Gasper/Lazarus was born into an Appalachia still suffering from the ravages of a Civil War that left its citizens resentful of both the Confederacy and the Union. His "ladyfriend" was the victim of normalized man-on-woman spousal abuse. The girl listening to the story at the end is meant to be a casualty of the various unbalanced proxy wars or invasions that have plagued the latter half of the 20th century as well as the first two decades of the current millennia (although I left this vague as not to clutter up the ending).

The protagonist, of course, was a kid born during the Civil Rights movement who suffered and died because of the atmosphere created by the vicious ideological backlash of the neo-liberal "New Right" in the 1970s. He was also drawn from hearing my parents talk about growing into social consciousness as teenagers in the same decade. Obviously their experience was incomparably different as they didn’t have to shoulder the baggage of racism, but what I mean is that there’s a really heart-breaking sense of cynicism and hopelessness that I find permeates their generation — at least in the lower class, which is where I’ve dwelt my entire life — that manifests in a firm detachment between what they feel and think personally and what they believe is actually possible politically. That kind of low political efficacy is understandable from people who saw the Summer of Love at age 12, and the Kent State University shooting at age 15, the same way my generation is really defined by watching the Iraq War go down during a period of intense political polarization. However, their generation was also the one that eventually made speculative media mainstream and took "lowbrow" forms of art like comic books and forced them to "grow up"; these were kids who needed escapism badly, but also felt the urge to make their escapism political later in life.

Lazarus and Kid Phoenix also fit into familiar tropes within superhero comics: tenuously controllable fire powers have long been a metaphor for tragic youth, and characters with creepy, monstrous bodies have often been the "heart" of the team even before Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four. The first image I had in my head was an antique mining helmet, the light cutting into an alleyway, and an extended hand with no weight to it. Once I knew that their powers were linked to the way they died, I knew that both characters had to have died burning, but that the way they burned had to inform the way in which they inhabited their new (or in Gasper’s case, old) skin. Ephemeral, versus visceral.

AM: This story contains some truly beautiful and compelling visuals and imagery, and that’s not what I expected in a story about what superheroes do off the page of a comic book. Is the artful imagery a standard part of your writing style? Do you tend to find the right words right away, or do you test out different phrases until you find the right one? (I ask because my writing style has some similar artistic elements, and I’m curious how other writers do this)

JG: Aww, thank you! I’m a little embarrassed to say that I definitely find the words I want immediately. When I’m trying to craft a powerful visual, I use the words that tug the strongest emotional reaction out of me at the moment I’m writing it — the very first words that come to me. I don’t care about what sounds nice, I care about what feels most powerful, so I just kind of … turn off my brain and let my fingers spit out the most instinctive, knee-jerk words they know. It’s the workmanship-like "plain" prose that I really struggle with and admire in other writers. When I was a teenager I used to just spit out reams and reams of very delicate and lovely, but ultimately static, poetic prose. At some point I realized that this was not the kind of writer I wanted to be; I was a very good cake decorator, but I needed to be the person baking the cake. So it’s those practical, invisible sentences that I agonize over most.

AM: What authors and/or artists have had the biggest creative influence on you?

JG: My automatic answer to this is always Samuel R. Delany, especially his early science fiction work like Nova and The Ballad of Beta-2. It’s especially appropriate here because I actually had the privilege of work-shopping this story with him at Clarion (which was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime dream come true kind of experience that I’m still pinching myself over in order to make sure it actually happened)!

I pull my general inspiration from all over: early 20th writers for prose, 90s video games for tone and horror, post-apocalypse comics for landscape and texture. A lot of my inspiration comes from reading historical monograms. My influence map is a weird cross-section of Nabokov, Tiptree, Silent Hill and E.H. Carr.

AM: You attended Clarion around the same time your short story "All My Princes Are Gone" appeared in Nightmare Magazine. How did your experiences at Clarion change your views on your own writing and your views on where your writing could go?

JG: The most important thing I got from Clarion is that I am allowed to write the kind of stories I want to write, rather than forcing myself to write what other people thought I should be writing. I was pretty discouraged with regards to my potential writing career around the time I got accepted into Clarion, even though it was still the only thing I really wanted to do with my life. It’s unspeakably important to have this workshop around not just to tell emergent spec writers that their writing is valid and valuable, but to show them that they’re mechanically capable of doing it by locking them in a house and forcing them at (metaphorical I promise) gunpoint to write 30-50k words in six weeks. I’d never written anything longer than eighty pages before Clarion; afterwards I went home and wrote a 168,000-word novel draft in five months.

AM: Your stage play, "Three Drops of Blood," performed at the 2014 Atlantic fringe festival, includes a commentary on power and powerlessness. There’s a similar parallel in a lot of superhero fiction, that someone who didn’t have power before their superhero "transformation" now has power and has to decide how to use it. Is this a literary theme you plan to continue playing with in your creative writing? Where did your interest in this theme stem from?

JG: Oh, well, you know — horror writers just write about what they’re afraid of! I have a moderately debilitating chronic illness and a long standing, deeply ingrained fear of diseases like cancer and the such inborn from the usual childhood experiences with relatives who die quickly and traumatically from things usually portrayed in the media as slow moving. It’s difficult for me to conceive of any story concept without a healthy dollop of body horror and this particular flavor of powerlessness creeps into most of my writing. I also — as someone who studied modern war history in their academic life — have put a lot of thought into the issue of hierarchical violence. I’m not interested in revenge fantasies, but I am just as interested in the psychological effect of committing violence as I am in how it feels to experience it. Because, you know, I am a very small woman and I am sometimes terrified of violence and inhabiting its skin makes for powerful, honest writing I’ve found.

I’m interested in the stories of "powers" as a burden, or something monstrous, absent of all the asinine (and often belittling to real life marginalized groups) trappings of "people with powers as an oppressed minority", and I’m interested in how transformation and transgression affect people who are more like me. In other words, every tortured white male anti-hero would be much better as someone who actually experience systemic oppression and violence. Privileged versions of these narratives tend to focus on re-affirming lofty virtues, social structure and responsibility and there are very good versions of that narrative, but I’m more interested in what these stories look like from the bottom, and what they do to characters on an intimate, psychological and philosophical level. No moralizing: just fragile, messy human emotions.

AM: What’s next for you? What current projects can you tell us about? What’s your dream creative project?

JG: I’ve been working on a novel for the past two years and hope to start shopping it around this summer. My creative dream project is whatever I’m working on at the moment, honestly. I really, really love to write and as long as I have time to do it, I’m happy.

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.

Starpower

Christopher Shultz

5,900 words

For now, you can still watch Marty’s creation online. It begins with this disclaimer:

WARNING: IF YOU VOTED FOR GOVERNOR YVETTE POLSON, DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO. IT CONTAINS POWERFUL SUBLIMINAL TEXT AND IMAGES THAT WILL IMPLANT SUICIDAL TENDENCIES IN YOUR MIND.

Every time I read that message, I do indeed get Suicidal Tendencies stuck in my head, specifically lyrics from their classic "Institutionalized":

Sometimes I try to do things

and it just doesn’t work out the way I wanted to.

About sums it up. I tried to be a songwriter and a singer, but I can’t do that anymore, unless the words, like pretty much all of them before "Thick," are about myself. And that’s just impossible. I have statements to make, commentaries about the state of our culture and politics. I have an agenda.

The video is a masochistic salt to the wound. I hit replay, over and over again. After the disclaimer, there we are, Phalanx, under a blue-lit haze, grainy and somewhat out-of-focus, on stage at Tavern Belmondo. Me on vocals and lead guitar, shaggy-headed and unshaven; Marty on bass, his white T-shirt a mundane façade hiding monstrous flesh beneath; Kim on drums, sneered lip and arms bulging as she pounds away, her hair a murder of crows in flight; and our newest member Jone on rhythm guitar, tall and elegant like a European model. She played this one and only gig with us.

There’s roughly forty seconds of us playing before the amateur videographer begins filming the incident at the bar.

It’s that forty seconds I re-watch. I don’t care to see the rest again.

The sound is terrible, a wall of discord, void of distinction save my vocals, which somehow came out audible. Visually speaking, we’re four blobs pulsing in relative unison.

Even still, it’s clear we were great. Better than great.

Had things worked out, this performance, this song, would have catapulted the band into a bigger, better sphere. But as it stands, Marty’s in jail, Kim and Jone want nothing to do with me, and I’ve been vocally castrated.

One little song. One lyrical suggestion. And now, here we are …

I don’t leave the house much anymore. Reporters still hound me as more bizarre facts about Marty surface — that his father abused him, that he was a member of the Socialist Party (such as it is), that he had bomb-making manuals downloaded to his computer. I don’t know how much of it I believe, but at the same time, what do I really know? About Marty, about the world? About myself? It’s like electricity doesn’t exist and the sun’s been blotted out from the sky. All is black and confusing.

This darkness is the only thing that makes sense anymore, and unless I strike upon a plan to turn things around, it is within this darkness I will remain.

§

It all started with "Thick," the anti-player-dude, anti-misogyny anthem that brought Phalanx some long-sought recognition. The chorus, screamed over Marty’s nasty detuned bass and Kim’s pocket beat, went like this:

You wanna fuck me

Yeah you wanna fuck me

I know you wanna fuck me

No you don’t? Then leave me alone.

‘Cause I don’t wanna be friends

I don’t wanna be friends

I just wanna fuck you

Fuck you and leave you alone

"Thick" was penned from the POV of a sexually-entitled shithead. It was meant to be satirical and pro-feminist. This fact was obvious to everyone but sexually entitled shitheads, who thought it was a rallying cry, but also to more than a handful of women who displayed a paradoxical reaction to the song, a phenomenon we witnessed after the very first performance.

We debuted the song at Harbor Bar (HarBar for short), a claustrophobic dive with walls painted yellow from years of cigarette smoke. Phalanx was still a three-piece then, but we were a full orchestra on "Thick," exhaling the song like trees giving oxygen to the packed house.

Afterwards, there were cold beers waiting for us at our usual booth. Marty, Kim and I plopped down, sweaty and exhausted. As we gulped our beers and discussed the show, this girl with white blonde hair and black-and-white striped tights approached the table. She stared at me with a hunger that seemed to erase Marty and Kim from existence.

"Uh … Hi," I said.

"Hello," said the girl. "Can I sit with you?"

"Um … Well, we’re just trying to relax for a minute, you know … but maybe I could meet you at the bar in a bit."

"I don’t want to be friends."

"What?"

"I just wanna fuck you."

My "Thick" lyrics. I thought at first she was throwing them back at me, as though she misunderstood the words or didn’t pick up on the irony. But she wasn’t angry. There was total seriousness in her eyes. Total lust.

I glanced at my bandmates. Their eyebrows were cocked to the ceiling.

"Um … No thanks," I said.

I’ve never seen a face drop like that. It was the epitome of dejection.

"I’m sorry," she muttered, and hurried away, the skin of her pale cheeks turning a deep plumb.

I felt bad about that, embarrassing her, but I didn’t chase after her either. I was never in the music game for the groupies, like all those 80s hair metal dumb-asses, getting drunk and stoned, banging women left and right. That’s not my scene, and embarrassed or no, that girl was a part of it. So I just chalked it up to too much alcohol on her part, and mostly forgot the incident.

That is, until "Thick" started picking up on YouTube and the college radio station, and we began moving up the local club ladder — from HarBar, to Pony’s, to Craft Lounge and beyond. But the more we played, the more the women poured out of the woodwork, throwing themselves at me, making no secret their intentions, many quoting my lyrics, just like the blonde girl in the striped tights: "I don’t want to be friends, Luke, I just wanna fuck you."

Then there was Sylv. She was a friend of Kim’s, this skinny, shy girl who wore her paint-splattered oversized jeans everywhere she went. It’d always been clear she had a crush on me, but she was too timid to ever do anything about it. But then she hears "Thick" at our Vast Expanse gig, and suddenly Sylv is sidling up next to me in our booth, laying her head on my shoulder, and telling me how much she wants to experience me in bed, insisting that we don’t have to talk again afterwards, that we can go back to being friendly strangers, so long as we can have one night of perfect sexual bliss.

We were all disturbed by Sylv’s behavior. She wasn’t drunk, because she didn’t drink. She wasn’t stoned, because she only smoked pot on Sundays. She was just … different.

I politely declined her advances, and we didn’t see her at a show again.

"It’s gotta be the exposure," I reasoned later that night, in the living room of the one story bungalow we shared, summertime cicadas serenading us through the mesh screen door. Kim agreed, insisting this kind of thing would happen more often, the bigger we got. Marty expanded upon this theory, stating that the natural sexual energy exuded by any band was coupling with the visceral nature of "Thick" and creating this kind of suggestive mental trickery.

Made sense. Still, it got to the point I wouldn’t socialize after shows. I even considered axing "Thick" from our set list, but I knew that was impossible. For better or worse, it was our H-I-T at the moment, and we had to keep riding its momentum.

Like it or not, this was the path I’d chosen.

§

I think the perceived confusion surrounding the "Thick" lyrics partially guided the bluntness of my next song, "Silver Screen." It was about our conservative governor Yvette Polson, a former actress who appeared in a few B-movies before transforming herself into a tax-dollar-wasting, arts-defunding, bigoted gas-industry slave. Polson had recently been reelected for a second term, and I was feeling particularly angry about that. I didn’t understand how anyone could cast a vote for this woman, who had reversed numerous advances we’d made in this state, including putting an indefinite halt on our public transportation initiative. Not to mention her countless anti-gay statements and actions, including vetoing state legislation that would have implemented stricter anti-discriminatory measures and ensured job safety for gays and lesbians in the workplace.

In my frustration, I wrote these words (utilizing a bit of double entendre, given that we still used a chad-punch ballot system):

You pricked her box

And now you’re infected

By the oil-blooded cunt

That you selected.

Fooled by the glamour and sheen

Of the sad old Silver Screen Queen

You pricked her box

Might as well have shot

Yrself in yr dumb-fuck head

So DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT

Shoot yrself in the head!

DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT

Shoot yrself in the fucking head

"I don’t know, man," Marty said after I read my bandmates the words.

Kim agreed. "This might be going too far."

I was persistent though. This was punk rock, which was offensive by virtue. I’d grown so tired of these pop punk acts whining about their hard lives in the suburbs. Where were songs like "God Save the Queen," "Washington Bullets," "Holiday in Cambodia" and "This Ain’t No Picnic"? I wanted to shake people up. If the song made them uncomfortable, then I’d done my job.

"Yeah," Marty said, "but what about the suicide thing? I mean…it just seems a bit much."

It’s a metaphor, I said. By voting for Polson, the royal WE were basically killing ourselves anyway. This woman wasn’t our friend or a public servant. She was an opportunist committed to personal advancement, and she would only make the lives of her constituency worse. So from my perspective, there wasn’t a difference between electing Polson and blowing your brains out. The acts were one and the same.

Eventually, Marty and Kim came around. I think the prospect of creating some truly visceral, gut-rumbling music was too appealing for them.

Down in our basement/recording studio, Marty plugged into his Big Muff fuzz pedal and crunched out a hook. Kim was all bass pedal and toms, with some ominous stick scrapes along the rim of her snare and skin-crawling cracks to the splash cymbal. I used a cheapy no-name electric guitar prepared with bottle caps, nails, and the ring clamps from some clothespins. The guitar’s dials and my amp cranked, I made these feedback-drenched skronking, demon-shriek sounds by tapping and plucking all that junk twined into the strings along the neck and around the pickups.

We bonked around, improvising and shaping what would become the verse/chorus/verse structure — jamming off it, just playing around and having fun in this gnarly noise landscape.

We were alive. I was alive.

When we had the song’s structure down, I switched to my Fender Jazzmaster and played a more traditional fuzzy rhythm to give the song some extra crunch. After one practice run-through, we laid down the basic track in one take. Then I dubbed over my vocals and jangly lead guitar parts myself, late at night after Marty and Kim had gone to bed. Mixed it on my laptop, played around with the left/right channels on the prepared guitar bit, added a touch of reverb to my vocals, and presented it to my bandmates the next day.

Sitting on the worn-down basement couch, their toes tapped. They bobbed their heads to the beat, especially during the DO IT DO IT chorus, like they couldn’t help it, the hook was so captivating, the words sung with such conviction, you had to say, "Yeah …Yeah … DO IT."

The song was sonically similar to our previous work, and yet it crackled with progress and maturation — more post punk than punk, a blend of groove and grit. Even my voice was different. I didn’t sound like some snotty twenty-five-year-old, but rather a wise old sage, looking out onto the world and recording his less-than-enthusiastic observations. There was a huskiness to those vocals, a weathered quality.

We all agreed it was the best thing we’d created so far. Hands down.

§

Phalanx got invited to play Tavern Belmondo — basically the CBGB’s of our city, the top of the alternative venue food chain. The Tarts were scheduled to play in two days, but they’d abruptly called it quits that afternoon, and club owner Greg Mann needed a replacement. He heard "Thick" and immediately shot us an email. We’d be opening for Brat Pact, a popular but tiresome sugar rock act. It felt like a weird pairing, and maybe a bit disingenuous on our part, but you just didn’t turn down an opportunity like that.

We planned to debut "Silver Screen" at the gig, but in order to recreate the song live, we’d need another guitarist. Kim persuaded her girlfriend Jone — a violinist with the Philharmonic who could learn any instrument—to come on board and play rhythm guitar, leaving me with lead duties. Within two hours of rehearsals, she had our set list down, including "Silver Screen." "Dude, they’re all like three chords," Jone said, "it wasn’t hard." We all laughed at this, and Kim planted a kiss on her cheek.

That night, we celebrated Jone’s seamless entry into the band with a joint and a round of "Dubbed Movie Theater," whereby we muted the TV and improvised ridiculous dialogue for a serious movie. We chose Taxi Driver. Marty pretty much played Travis Bickle all night, doing a quasi-Mickey Mouse impression, while Kim used a husky biker dude voice for Betsy and a Valley Girl voice for Iris. I provided dialogue for pretty much everyone else in the movie, while Jone did sound effects and score. All throughout, we laughed so hard our faces hurt, but during the scene where Martin Scorsese plays Bickle’s passenger — during which I griped in a Droopy voice about the price of pastrami while Jone made well-timed fart noises with the palm of her hand — we actually had to pause the movie for a good ten minutes so we could catch our breath.

Joking and laughing in perfect sync with each other, it was just like being in the band, that tightness of intuition and complementary styles. We were stitched together, an autonomous and yet connected entity. And I was certain the thread binding us together would never fray, never break. In my head, we could only grow closer and more tight-knit.

We’d all be dead to each other in a week’s time.

§

The next day, I stumbled into the living room and found Marty sitting on the couch, working on his laptop. He wore the same clothes as the day before, and his bloodshot eyes and slackened face screamed sleep deprivation.

Without looking up at me, Marty said, "I want to show you this."

I sat down next to him on the couch. He’d put together a video collage to be played during our show, mostly a hodgepodge of old film clips — no real meaning, Marty admitted, it just looked cool. But then, to coincide with the reveal of "Silver Screen," the collage changed. There was footage of Polson in her crummy B-movies, desaturated and tinted with a frosty cyan filter, superimposed with shots of melting ice caps, huge avalanches of frozen water plummeting into the sea — a pointed message to counter balance the previous nonsense. It visually symbolized this "new direction" we’d found with the song.

As we watched the montage flowing by on the screen, Marty said, "This thing we’re doing, this new territory … It’s going to destroy us as a band. You know that, right?"

"No," I said, taken aback.

Marty nodded his head. "Even with ‘Thick,’ we were still ‘us.’ We were playful in our anger. This new song, though, this footage, it’s all pretty heavy. It’s a turning point, and even though I’m one hundred percent on board, it signifies the beginning of the end for us. We’ll be going from fame to infamy with this, and I just want to make sure you’re prepared."

I told Marty he was being ridiculous. This new song represented our evolution, nothing more. He had nothing to worry about. He panicked sometimes, that was all. I patted him on the shoulder and told him to get some sleep. We had practice later, and he needed to be in tip-top shape.

So he did, and I convinced myself I shouldn’t worry too.

§

None of us had any idea that Gregg Mann, the owner of Tavern Belmondo — the number one hangout for hipsters, hippies, atheists and anarchists — was a registered Republican. Moreover, we were totally unaware of the loaded 9mm handgun he kept tucked underneath the bar, a safety precaution in this "rough part of town."

Even if we had known these things, that wouldn’t have stopped us from playing the song. Greg of all people needed to hear it.

But if I had known what would happen …

Yeah, I don’t think we would have debuted "Silver Screen" there. Or anywhere, I guess.

I don’t know though. We say harmful things, and then we say, well, I didn’t really mean it. But then, why did we say it in the first place …?

The performance up until "Silver Screen" went off without a hitch. Under the crisp bluish glow of Marty’s collage, with our usual balletic thrashing about the stage, and with the new addition of Jone standing statuesque with her Fender Jaguar, we looked like a cacophony of sea creatures manically worshipping a stone Goddess. We played "Thick" three songs in at my insistence, eager to appease anyone only there to hear our hit (and also weed out the groupies). I wasn’t going through the motions of the set, of course, but at the same time, our finale and the big debut couldn’t come any sooner.

Timing our songs to the slideshow helped to speed things along. I kept audience banter to a minimum, and we crashed through the set, the proverbial sweat, blood and tears drenching each tune, each one a piece of rock we had to climb, ascending the mountain with energy and persistence, "Silver Screen" awaiting us at the peak.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, we reached the summit. I said, "New song," into the mic and we launched right into it, Marty gnashing on his bass, Kim kicking in with her low, hellish beat, Jone slicing into the main rhythm and me, grabbing my prepared cheapo off stage and shattering into the music, right on queue. The crowd didn’t know whether to boogie or run away screaming.

I started singing. There was scant differentiation between my voice and my fucked-up guitar — loud, aggressive, weird, unsettling, but sublime, hacking at our governor like a psychopath, shaming the people who gave her power.

Visually speaking, I wasn’t so much aware of the audience, but I could feel them, congregated in alliance, absorbing and unifying themselves around my piercing words. There were, however, a few spots of dissent out there in the haze, little blips of light psychically expressing their displeasure at my blunt message. I’d anticipated this — there were likely more Brat Pact fans out there than our own, and that band wasn’t as political as we were. So I held nothing back. All that frustration and hatred flowed through me and escaped via my hands and my mouth.

They needed to hear it. I’d make sure they did …

It happened during the second round of the chorus. As one, Phalanx beat down on the crowd again —

DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT

Shoot yrself in the head

DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT

Shoot yrself in the FUCKING HEAD

One of those opposing lights out there popped like an old-school camera flash, and the other dots swarmed around the burst of energy.

Marty stopped playing first. He saw the whole thing.

Kim followed, and saw Greg Mann sliding down the wall of shattered, liquor-leaking bottles, blood gushing from his nose and staining his white Rolling Stones lips/tongue T-shirt.

Jone stopped short when she saw, she would later tell the police, a pimply young woman with round sunglasses leap over the bar. Rather than assisting Greg in some way, she scooped up his 9mm and pressed the barrel to her temple.

I was the last to stop playing. I heard the shot and looked up to see a hoard of people pressing themselves behind the bar and scrambling for the gun, which had fallen to the floor with Round Sunglasses. A scraggly boy snatched up the pistol, put it under his chin, and fired. His body fell back against the bar, his hand stretching along the lacquered finish now slick with three people’s blood. A guy in a trucker hat reached for the gun still pressed in the kid’s lifeless hand.

The rest of the audience was screaming by now. A man slightly older than most of the kids grabbed Trucker Hat’s arm, but the boy yanked himself away, slid the gun’s barrel into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

I couldn’t move. I was transfixed on this … impossible scene. Impossible is the only word to describe it.

Someone tugged at my arm. It was Marty, his eyes wide and pleading. Behind him, the rest of Phalanx retreated backstage. Though her back was to me, I could tell Kim was sobbing.

Another gunshot popped, and I let Marty lead me away.

Backstage, the lead singer of Brat Pact was on the phone with 911.

§

Of course, someone filmed the whole thing with their cellphone camera and uploaded the video to YouTube. It was removed after a few hours, but found new life on LiveLeak.

It was a train wreck video. You couldn’t help but watch it.

As such, a rash of suicides spread throughout the state. It wasn’t long before the media, and the police, drew the connection.

Not that it was particularly hard. There I was onstage, snarling out to the crowd SHOOT YRSELF IN THE FUCKING HEAD. Followed by Gregg Mann and fourteen other people in the crowd doing exactly that (could have been more, but the pistol ran out of bullets). Followed by countless people watching from their homes, their places of work, in other places of business, in public spaces, collectively losing their shit and blowing their brains out.

If viewers didn’t own a gun, they went to outlandish lengths to obtain one and carry out my "directive." One guy was hanging out in Liberty Park watching messed-up, lurid clips with his sister, so of course they stumbled upon our performance. He’d voted for Polson, she hadn’t voted at all. When the siblings got to THAT part of the video, the man went nuts and, seeing a cop on horseback trotting by, began chasing the officer, begging him to hand over his firearm. I know because the woman, shocked by her brother’s sudden irrationality, began filming the incident.

This bit of footage went viral too. It was "proof," according to the sister and many other people, that the video somehow possessed the ability to control people’s minds.

By this point, the police had already questioned me numerous times, holding me for hours at the station, grilling me. What did I know about subliminal messages and the mind’s susceptibility to suggestion? I wouldn’t lie and say I didn’t know about those subjects. I’m not just a lover of music, but also of sound and media in general. I knew, for instance, about the subtle techniques commercial directors used to convince viewers they wanted to buy this fast car, that this ice cream cone with its perfectly-sculpted, bulbous dollop of deliciousness would give them the happiness they sought (never mind the fact the ice cream was actually mashed potatoes). I knew about Daffy Duck secretly shilling for the government (BUY BONDS!) during World War II. I knew about Pazuzu grimacing in one frame of The Exorcist.

Yeah, I knew about these things, but I certainly didn’t use those methods in my songwriting — how could I? The lyrics were right there in front of them, in plain black and white, SHOOT YRSELF IN THE FUCKING HEAD. Doesn’t get more direct than that.

But what about the footage playing behind us? Here, the two detectives stared me down, neither one of them inclined to play "good cop."

There were no subliminal messages contained in that footage, I insisted.

Except … They showed me the video again, frame by frame, and … there they were. For every ten seconds or so of images depicting our fearless governor "acting" her black heart out, there were blips of text and hidden images.

YOU ARE EVIL one frame said.

DO WHAT HE SAYS said another.

DO IT.

Still images of men and women holding guns to their heads, followed by the gory aftermaths of their suicides. The kind of stuff you see on LiveLeak. Bud Dwyer was in there, and that surveillance footage of a man blowing his head off in an interrogation room not unlike the one I sat, the fluorescent lights too bright and sickly green. A man on a highway exploding his skull with a shotgun. Other instances of self-inflicted gunshot wounds I didn’t recognize. One graphic suicide after another.

Marty. He was "off" the morning I found him on the couch, working on the montage. Stating that this moment would end the band. He knew something I didn’t.

My genuinely shocked reaction to the presence of those frames, coupled with my repeated insistence I had nothing to do with it, eventually convinced the detectives I was telling the truth. They needed to focus their attentions on Marty.

Not me, not Kim and Jone, even though they had a motive, given their "homosexual leanings," as the detectives put it.

No, it was just Marty.

The fact he’d disappeared shortly before the police arrived at Tavern Belmondo that night only bolstered this conviction.

§

None of this added up, of course. Subliminal messages didn’t work like that — a common misconception, and one Marty’s defense lawyer would no doubt debunk at his trial. The only way indirect instructions to kill yourself might work is if the victim in question was already suicidal to begin with, and even that’s a stretch. Greg Mann and most all the other people who shot themselves did not display any telltale signs of depression or a desire to harm themselves. Only a few of them had substantial histories of substance abuse. That a few violent images and some declarative text would inspire these people to take their own lives was a dubious notion, and scientifically impossible.

Not to mention, the woman who filmed us at Tavern Belmondo stood slightly to the side of the stage, so the screen displaying the footage was partially obscured by a column, Kim’s kit, and Marty’s rig. Moreover, the montage was rear-projected to ensure none of it bled out onto the band. This meant anyone who watched the now infamous video would’ve seen only fragments of the text and images. How could it be argued these people where tricked into suicide when it was impossible for them to see the messages in their entirety?

Finally, while Greg Mann wasn’t the only person "affected" that night, he was the first, and it’s doubtful he watched any of our performance, because he rarely watched the bands at all. During shows, Greg always cleaned up the bar, or opened new bottles of liquor, or tapped new kegs. So even if it was possible that visually subliminal stimuli could induce suicide, Greg couldn’t have had direct or continuous exposure to Marty’s handiwork.

If he couldn’t see it, why would he DO IT?

He could hear. That’s why.

He could hear everything I said. So could everyone else in the Tavern. So could the hundreds of people who watched the video.

It wasn’t Marty at all.

It was me. Just me.

The women, reacting to my "Thick" lyrics, wanting to fuck me. And now this.

It was me.

But it couldn’t be me. There were no X-Men. No Scanners, no Village of the Damned kids, no Jedi masters waving their hands and telling Storm Troopers these weren’t the droids they were looking for. The world didn’t work that way.

And yet … How else to explain what happened?

Nothing else made sense.

§

We were relaxing at Jone’s apartment one afternoon, passing around a fat, smelly joint, trying to forget the whole ordeal for a while. There was cloud cover outside, causing the light inside to be thin and dull. Still summer, but looking very much like winter.

I tried to relax. But the question gnawed at me, prodded me, taunted me. I had to be sure.

I picked up Kim’s acoustic guitar, began strumming a C chord and improvising some words:

Kiss yr lover, kiss yr lover

Kiss yr lover right now.

Kiss Kiss Kiss yr lover

Kiss yr lover, right now.

The couple stared at me for what seemed like several minutes as I put my heart and soul into this silly love song. My strumming and singing grew more intense, impassioned. Deep down, I kinda hoped they wouldn’t, but I sang as though I did, as though it was the only thing in the world I’d ever wanted and would ever want again.

Kiss Kiss Kiss yr lover right now!

And just when I thought this whole display was stupid, Kim and Jone, in perfect unison, turned to each other and kissed.

I stopped playing. We were silent.

The entire room, even the walls, felt awkward somehow.

I had my answer.

And, I think, deep down, Kim had hers too.

Quietly, she asked me to leave.

§

At some point while I was gone from the house, Kim gathered most of her belongings and split. I haven’t seen her since.

Of all the things she took, she left her drum kit in the basement.

§

Marty’s grandmother found him hiding out in her pool house and called the police. Cuffed and hauled away by men in tan-and-brown uniforms, Marty managed to slip in a statement to the gathered reporters. "Listen you fuckers, you screwheads: here is a man who would not take it anymore … Here is a man who stood up."

Taxi Driver. Great for the cops and the media. Aligning himself with one of cinema’s most deluded, violent sociopaths, Marty sealed his fate as the pariah society wanted him to be. He was the lone gunman, the sick mastermind behind a wave of subliminally-influenced suicides. A Charles Manson-like figure. Pure evil.

Everyone disregarded me. I wasn’t a madman. I was just some punk screaming inflammatory lyrics. As one journalist put it, "a singer unschooled in the art of subtlety."

But he was wrong. Everyone’s wrong.

Marty thinks he is God’s lonely man. But he isn’t.

I am.

§

I play my cheapo guitar late at night. Headphones jacked into my practice amp, volume nob and fuzz pedal cranked. I drown out the statements snaking their way from my brain to my throat until my fingers are numb and my eardrums throb from the distortion.

It’s no use. The words creep out anyway.

I deposit them onto paper, close my journal and try to forget them.

Doesn’t work. I find myself humming a tune, and before long, I’m singing about this or that social issue, damning those I find disgraceful. I have a knee-jerk inclination to call my bandmates into the living room.

But it’s just me, alone in this house, the remnants of Phalanx lying dormant in the basement like an unspeakable secret. All that equipment, all those instruments, silenced.

Just like me.

§

Tonight I’m drunk. The video’s gone from the Internet completely.

They removed it from LiveLeak, and they’ll show anything.

I replay the memory in my head, but I can’t remember the actual gig. I only see the video, compressed for smaller screens, fuzzy and pixelated. And I can’t even see that clearly.

We were so fucking great. Beyond great.

We didn’t even get to finish the song.

I robbed Kim of her desire to play drums. It’s my fault Marty’s in jail.

We’re not in a band anymore. We’re not friends anymore.

And I can never get it back. Because if I do, I’ll kill a bunch of people, or I’ll make otherwise sensible women drop their collective panties, or some such other indirect consequence.

This is what I was born to do — make music, sing lyrics. A piece of me has been torn away.

Maybe I should take my own "Silver Screen" advice.

Do it do it do it do it, shoot myself in the head …

§

I woke up with a searing headache. My first hangover in a long time.

This is stupid.

§

Today, Yvette Polson said she’d make illegal all marriages in our state if gays were granted the right to wed by the Supreme Court.

Here I’ve been these last several weeks, rotting away in this empty house I can no longer afford on my own, wallowing in self-pity, wasting my talents.

I do have a talent. I have a power. And if I can’t use my power the way I’d originally intended, then I think it’s time to find a new path. One that’s similar to the first, just different. Maybe, arguably, better.

They say absolute power corrupts absolutely. Perhaps that’s true. All I know is, I cannot sit idly by and let people like Yvette Polson veto us back into the Stone Age.

I cannot let that happen. So …

There’s an open seat on the city council. I’ve entered the race.

I don’t have a campaign manager. I have zero funding. I have no political experience whatsoever. But I do have a new, clean-cut look, a pearly-white, winning smile, a nice, firm handshake.

And, I have a song.

I play it on an acoustic guitar so it has mass appeal. The lyrics are simple, straightforward. Everyone can appreciate them.

The song goes:

Vote for me

Just vote for me

You want to vote for me

I’m the one you want

I’m the one you need

The one the one the one

I’m the one and only

One.

Repeat as necessary until the crowd sings along.

Preliminary polls look good. I’m not worried.

I’m already thinking about 2016. State House. From there, I don’t even know. Sky’s the limit.

Once I tried to do something, and it just didn’t work out the way I wanted to. That’s no longer the case.

It’s like Kurt Cobain said in "Smells Like Teen Spirit":

I’m worse at what I do best

And for this gift I feel blessed …

Things will definitely work out for me this time.

Christopher Shultz writes weird, dark fiction. His stories have appeared both online and in print, including most recently in freeze frame flash fiction, Grievous Angel, and Apex Magazine. He contributes columns on books and film at LitReactor.com, and he also wrote a guest article for Tor.com. Christopher lives in Oklahoma City with his fiancée Lauren and their two mostly well-behaved cats.

La Llorona

Rodney Gomez

Walking a country road one late evening, I came upon a woman who carried a disarming valise. Quiere comprar una fruta? she asked. I expected her to open her carriage, but she instead displayed a family of stones, each cut into a different kind of fright: a skull, a devil’s head, a killer, a venture capitalist. I chose an Olmec head after my own design and promptly brought it home. It made a wonderful chopping board, I was so proud. Then it began to tremble. Oh sinner, what have you worshipped? The head cracked open in wailing under the soft cotton. A tassel of snakes, precious purely through infancy, tumbled out. They slithered up my paralyzed legs and into my eyes, nose and mouth. My head felt like a tube filled with maps. My eyes saw lightning or spirits, it was hard to tell. Little darlings controlled me and I wept. I travelled back to that old country road and the woman now rolling a jukebox along the cobbles. Very quickly I was emptied. The snakes slid into the lighted slot where loose change should go. Thank you, the woman said. I haven’t heard that song in years.

Rodney Gomez is the author of Mouth Filled with Night (Northwestern University Press, 2014), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize, and Spine, winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize (Newfound, 2015). His poetry has appeared in various journals, including Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, Blackbird, Salt Hill, Drunken Boat, and RHINO, where it won the Editors’ Prize. Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, he earned a BA from Yale and an MFA from the University of Texas-Pan American. He has been awarded residencies to the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Santa Fe Art Institute. He has also served on the board of Migrant Health Promotion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of migrants, immigrants, and related populations. He works as the transportation director at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

Knights of the Smooth Hull

Chris Phillips

The hull of the ship is

sleek, but I’ve never touched it.

Nobody living has. Pictures let

us guess and stories let

us imagine, but it is a thing that both

surrounds and alludes.

I’ve read about the sky.

In my daydreams I gallop

on horseback as we hunt under that

lid on creature to eat

creature. Now all gather with slack faces for

stale provender chips.

We used to be alive …

used to wander and wonder

and dream. Now we all wait. But for what?

We left the Earth to save

humankind, but when we arrive we won’t be

alive … walking shells.

Some of us know this. Some

of us fear this. We don’t have

sky, but we have a game. Short wire

is the quest the rest are

knights of the smooth hull. We hunt among rivets

to save (kill) people.

I tremble when I think

about New Earth. What we might

find and who (what) we will need to kill.

The architects built the

infrangible skin for life. But jagged teeth

keep us awake, alive.

Chris Phillips was born in the heart of Kentucky, but being the son of a traveling preacher, he grew up across the country, devouring a buffet of American culture. His fiction can be found in IGMS, Penumbra eMag, and elsewhere. He also works as managing editor for Flash Fiction Online. Visit him online at www.chrisphillipsauthor.com.

The Big Bah-Ha

C.S.E. Cooney

For Bea LaMonica and Gillian Hastings

16,100 words

Beatrice did not wake up in Heaven.

She lay flat on her back. The surface beneath her was hard as concrete, maybe bouncier, like those playgrounds made from recycled tires. Bitter crazy cold out, but she could not see her breath.

"Dead, then," said Beatrice.

Not panic. Not exactly. A pang, maybe. Best not to pay attention to that. Might begin to gnaw holes in a girl when a girl most needs to be whole.

So Beatrice sat up and patted her head. Pigtails still held, thank the Good Goddess Durga, as Dad used to say … although Dad hadn’t believed in any pantheon predating Darwin, had gone gravy to the slaprash an atheist and a scientist and taking in vain the names of all fiend-eating ladygods sharing cross references in the ‘cyclopedia.

‘Spossible, she thought with an inward sparkle of enthusiasm, I meet up Dad in this place. We’ll discuss gods, or death, or breathing without breath, or whatever, like we used to do in the olden days, except …

Except this place seemed to stretch out forever like an elastic elephant skin. Empty. Or — not empty? There. A gleam of red and white, listing not too far from where she sat. A striped barber’s pole. A fat white glove at its pinnacle wriggling HELLO. The arrow of its index finger urged her down a path.

The path, Beatrice saw, was the same gray as ground and horizon, easy to miss. Just a thin groove to be picked across like the wirewalkers used to do under the big tops. Or a girl might elect to stroll with more dignity along its side. If a girl followed it at all.

But standing still invited the biting chill, and Beatrice shivered. The pointing glove reminded her of the Flabberghast’s hands, which were just as white, but much slimmer. Slim and graceful, nearly transparent, the fingers too long and the wrists too bony. He was the last thing she remembered: his long painted face peering at her through the bushes, his eyes shining black as beetles.

"He killed me!" Beatrice said aloud, startled. "Him and his diamond teeth."

Well, she didn’t remember that part, not ezzactly. Not the getting gobbled part, only the part where he smiled.

But she was here, wasn’t she? And here could be anywhere, but it could also be in the Flabberghast’s stomach. And even if here were really elsewhere, she’d bet she’d left her bones behind to undergo eternal digestion. Danged Flabberghast! Old carrion eater. Old clown.

But how’d he get close enough? Beatrice had lived by the same command she’d drummed into her little Barka Gang. If she’d told Tex, Diodiance, Granny Two-Shoes, and Sheepdog Sal once, she’d told them a kajillion times: "Beware the Flabberghast."

And when they asked her why, she’d said, "Well, because he’s a Tall One. Because he appeared in the gravy yard with the other eight after the world ended. Because he’s here to eat the bones, and he’ll eat yours when you go."

"So?" Diodiance always asked. Diodiance liked the Flabberghast, liked his cardboard hut, his yellow shoes, his little way of bowing low. "We ain’t dead yet, so he can’t rightly eat us. Till our slaprashes show, Queen B, mayn’t he come over to play?"

Quick as a slung-shot rock, Beatrice always parried, "What if Ol’ Flabby don’t feel like waiting till your slaprash shows? What if he picks up a crushing stone with his weird white hand and caves in your skull, strips your flesh to stretch upon a great moony drum, and sucks your bones good and fresh? The Flabberghast’s not contained like the other Tall Ones. The gravy yard gates don’t hold him. Lives outside the arch in his cardboard hut, don’t he, while his friends slaver and babble and gobble up crypt-crunch behind the black iron bars, those white lights on their shoulders a-shinin’. And don’t he smile to be so free, aiming his big, bright teeth at any kiddo strayin’ bold from her gang."

Tex, taking her pause for breath as permission, would jump in to plead with Diodiance: "Di, don’t stray." Those two were just each other’s age, just shy of nine. His ashy, stiff hair stood on end at the thought of losing her.

"Oh. Awright." Diodiance never did sound convinced.

And Beatrice, more quietly, made sure to repeat what they’d all heard before. "Don’t stray." She gazed at her Barkas with the solemnity of her age. Twelve now, or thereabouts, and they all knew the slaprash would get her soon. Watching them remember this, she’d soften her fierceness to a smile.

"Barka dears, this is world’s end. You’ve only got a few years left to your names. You gotta live ‘em, not go playin’ flirt to Death’s own maggotman — no matter how he smiles and bows. Don’t go near the gravy yard. Don’t stray. And beware the Flabberghast."

Or not.

Sighing for her lost Barkas, Beatrice pushed herself up from the squishy hard ground. Her gait felt off. She glanced down.

"Appears," she observed aloud, "I’m missing my shoe."

Not only that, but the white cotton lace edging her left sock had gone all rusty. Looked old. Looked like it’d been dragged oh, many a long mile. Or like something had bled all over it. Someone.

Beatrice bit her lip, and even that felt like nothing, and she covered her eyes with her hands, but there was only the same gray inside as everywhere else. The thought of limping listlessly along that thin gray groove with only one shoe and a rusty sock was the three-ton straw set atop a brittle-boned and spindly-kneed camel, and it was enough, it was outside enough!

Beatrice crumpled and began to cry.

"Please!" she sobbed, her tears all dried to dust. "Oh, please! Oh, Durga! Oh, Dad! Daddy!"

Above her, pouring from a rip in the empty sky, something like ravens circled.

§

Tex crept back to the Catchpenny Shop-’n’-Save where the other members of the Barka Gang awaited.

"Beatrice is gone."

His face, gussied up for recon, was ghoulish under the black paint. The whites of his eyes were very white, but his teeth looked yellow. Tex never did learn to brush regular, though Diodiance nightly whupped him upside his rattlebox for forgetting.

"Gone?" Diodiance asked. "Like, to the gravy yard?"

Tex shook his head. Fleas flew. "Nope. But I found a ribbon from her hair right there by the black iron gates. So I axed the Tall Ones through the bars if they’d seen her, and they smacked their lips and said, Nothing fresh has come in oh so long, and won’t I stand a little closer please, and what nice fat hands I have. I’m thinking, Di, you can’t go into the gravy yard ‘less you pass the Flabberghast. And I’m thinking, Di, it’s the Flabberghast what’s got Queen B for sure."

Diodiance shook her head. "Ate her up, poor dead Beatrice!" She wrapped her arms hard around herself and tried to think how Beatrice would sound in their situation. Cool. Assured. At least four years older than anyone present.

"No more than we should’ve ‘spected," she said at last. "Queen B told us her own dang self that the slaprash was bounded to boom her pretty soonish. And when it did, her body is bargained to the gravy yard. That’s the deal; our slaprash shows, we go and die where the Tall Ones can see us and eat us after. We do this, they stay behind the gates till the last of us is gonnered. They leave us alone."

Tex did not look comforted. He squatted on the floor near the shoe racks. They were used shoes, lightly scuffed. You could still smell the feet of people who’d donated them to the Catchpenny way back in the olden days. A dead-people-feet smell. He turned to the third member of their gang.

"Whaddya think, Granny Two-Shoes? ‘Bout Beatrice? Is she not just gone but dead?"

Granny Two-Shoes looked up from the red-and-yellow race cars she’d found in the toy aisle. She had contemplated a race between the cars and the bullet casings she’d gleaned from the gutters, but decided that, while bullets indeed moved faster than cars, even a toy car bests a spent bullet. No race, really. No glory. It would be much more interesting to stack as many of them on top of each other as could balance unwobbled, then push them down for the smash! The lap of her white nightgown sagged under the weight of her treasures.

Granny Two-Shoes didn’t have regular language. Didn’t want it. She was half past three and thought she got on pretty well with Sheepdog Sal as interpreter. Tex buckled under her eloquent gaze and redirected his question to the dog.

"Okay, Granny. Tell Sal what you think, then. Have her bark once for dead, twice for gone, three for she’ll be home in time to feed us Cheerios."

Bending her head to Sheepdog Sal’s flopsy ear, Granny Two-Shoes imparted her opinion in a way Sal would understand.

Sheepdog Sal barked once.

Tex and Diodiance stared at each other in despair. Sighing, Granny Two-Shoes went back to her pile of race cars and casings. She was rarely wrong, but that didn’t make being right any easier.

Tex knuckled the inner corners of his welling eyes. Diodiance never could bear his crying. Made her bawl like a swoll-bellied baby herself, not the pragmatic nearly nine-year-old she was. If the two of ‘em turned this into a big ol’ snotfest, it might upset Granny Two-Shoes into becoming ever more stoic. And Beatrice always said, "Let Granny be as much a child as she can bear. She’s the youngest girl in the whole wide world, and we owe her that."

Diodiance got her squeezing heart under control. Opened her dark eyes wide. Squared her shoulders. Flung back her matted cornrows. Bared her teeth. She’d once fought off a wild Doberman with nothing but a yardstick and the Barka war cry. She could do what needed doing. Just watch.

"Tex. Granny. Sal. Way I’m seein’ it, we gotta do us some death rite. Queen B showed us how. Pick out a place she loved. Dec’rate it. Tinfoil balloons and Silly String, that picture of her dad she loved. Put what’s left of her there in a crow box. But keep of hers what’s useful," she added mindfully, "like her slingshot."

Tex sucked on his overbite. "To do the thing proper, we’d need her … leftovers."

"Yup," answered Diodiance, too quickly. "Which means … the Flabberghast."

Tex groaned.

Diodiance sped ahead even faster. "We can win her stuff from him with games. Flabby likes games, and we Barkas are the best. No grown-up games, we’ll say. No chess or checkers or Scrabble-like stuff with words and counting. Maybe tag?"

Granny Two-Shoes cleared her throat. She contemplated the peeking tips of her pink, patent leather Mary Janes, and wondered how best to alert the others to the dangers she perceived. Sheepdog Sal was an angel of understanding, but there were nuances even she could not manage. Quickly, Granny laid out four race cars. She pointed to the first, then jabbed her finger at Tex. Likewise, she associated herself, Diodiance, and Sheepdog Sal with corresponding vehicles.

At last she showed them all a slim bullet casing, held in her pinched thumb and forefinger. With her free hand, she made a gesture in precise mimicry of the Flabberghast’s formal bow, with which he unfailingly greeted his visitors. The bullet casing, then, was the Flabberghast.

At Tex and Diodiance’s nods of comprehension, Granny Two-Shoes moved her playing pieces around the dirty tile floor in a game of tag. As the cars separated from one another and scattered in all directions, the deadly bullet casing sought each of them out separately and pounced, dragging them back to base. Checkmate.

Tex gulped.

"Granny’s right," he said. "We gotta stick together. No tag, or even Hide-and-Seek, or Flabby’ll pick us off for sure."

"Red Rover?" Diodiance suggested pragmatically.

Tex scratched his freckles. "Dunno. Ol’ Flabby’s pretty big. One of the tallest Tall Ones. He might break through, and then he’d win the game and bargaining rights. That won’t win us back B’s bones. "

Diodiance slowly lifted one leg behind her the way she’d learned in ballet, in the olden days, back before the slaprash. Easier to focus when balance is at stake. She stretched out an arm to finger the sleeve of a secondhand coat that hung on the fifty-percent-off rack.

Maybe she remembered, or maybe she had dreamed, shopping with her momma at the Catchpenny. Eight-dollar winter coats. Made of real wool. Red wool. From red sheep, Momma used to say. All the way from London. That was all acrost the sea, which was bigger than the big lake to the East, and even the lake was like something out of Queen B’s bedtime stories, for Diodiance had never seen it, and never would. She settled into a plié.

"Here’s what, Barkas. Come noon-up, we’ll parley with the Flabberghast. We owe Queen B her death rite. Remember when she faced off Aunt Oolalune with fisticuffs? Remember when she led the march on the Rubberbaby Gang, and won Granny Two-Shoes back for the Barkas? Not for her, Granny’d be slave bait still to those dirty snotbums."

Tex shifted. Not quite a shrug. Not quite an agreement. Diodiance had never understood his problem with the Flabberghast. With her it was never, "Isn’t the Flabberghast scary as thunder?" but always "Isn’t the Flabberghast fancy and strange?" and, "Isn’t the Flabberghast’s voice so sweet?" and, "Don’t the Flabberghast smell like pineapples and toothpaste and broken perfume bottles and the moonlight on pine trees?"

Her obsession was, in his opinion, unfortunate. But she was correct; Beatrice deserved this much from them upon her death. She had taken care of them far back as he could remember. He could not remember the olden days. Sometimes he didn’t think he believed in them.

Oh, if only they could deal with any other Tall One but the Flabberghast. At least the rest of them dwelled behind the gravy yard wall. You could keep the gate between you and the white lights on their shoulders. You could offer them old bones through the bars in exchange for stuff that came from the graves they exhumed for their banquets. Diamond rings, or pictures in fancy frames, or bouquets of flowers tied up in someone’s braided hair. Best were their queer shiversome stories about life under the hills, with the folks they only ever referred to as "those underground."

But to creep close to the gray stone arch, where the Flabberghast lived in his cardboard house? Where he lived outside the black iron gates, with nothing keeping him in?

That was like cutting off your finger in shark water.

§

WELCOME TO CHUCKLE CITY!!! IT’S A LAUGH A MINUTE!!!

Beatrice stood before a high wall. The stones of the watchtower were as shiny a pink as a piece of watermelon bubblegum all blown up. The billboard that announced the city was lettered in bold yellow, with six orange exclamation points like floating construction cones.

Balloons everywhere.

Balloons tangled in the portcullis. Balloons tied to the barbed wire lining the heights of the walls. Balloons flying like pennants from the watchtower’s parapet, lurid against the uniform sky.

From beyond the balloon-obscured grid of the portcullis came a thin strain of cheerful music. It sounded as if a very small person in a very large coffee can played it, just for laughs.

If she ever felt less like laughing, Beatrice couldn’t remember. Her mouth pulled down at the edges as if weights hung from her lips. She could feel the hard pinch of her brows drawn tightly together. Dad had always called that look "Nana Larsson’s Evil Eye," and said he knew what side of the family Beatrice favored that day, and for Durga’s sake, might he be spared?

Today, Beatrice didn’t feel like sparing anyone her Evil Eye. Not the billboard, not the city, not the gray groove, or the gray sky, or the large gray ravens circling above.

She just wanted Dad. That was all. And Dad was not here, though she had been walking forever.

A silky, silly breeze danced over her brow. It was not sunshine, but it was the closest thing to it Beatrice had known since her arrival in these deadlands. The breeze seemed to chime, seemed to tickle and tingle and ring. Beatrice almost smiled. But before she could make up her mind, the breeze went away again, and so did her inclination.

About that time, a jolly shout echoed down from the pink watchtower:

"Ho there, girlington! Are you new to the Big Bah-Ha?"

"Is that where I am?" Beatrice asked, looking up but not raising her voice.

"Why, of course you are here! Where did you think you were?"

Beatrice shrugged. "Been walkin’ alone since I got here. Except for the — the critterbirds."

"The which?"

Beatrice pointed at the sky, toward the gray ravens. From a window in the watchtower, out popped a small, round face with round, pink-painted cheeks, glittering tinsel-green eyelashes, and a head of hair as blue as radioactive violets. Owl-like, the head twisted nearly full circle to stare up into the sky. Seeing the gray ravens for herself, she gasped.

"Gacy Boys!" squeaked the little clown. "And you still all in one piece! Bless my soul!"

"I threw my shoe at one when it got too close," Beatrice said. Her socks she had stripped a while back, tossing them over her shoulder like salt to ward off ghosts. After a lot of walking and squinting at the sky, she couldn’t help but notice that the ravens only looked like ravens when you expected them to be ravens. But if you stared through your lashes and a little sideways-like, weren’t they something else again?

Something with heads that might be human, hooded like hangmen.

But Beatrice did not tell the little clown any of that. She already seemed upset enough. Even her pink paint seemed to blanch. She whimpered what sounded like, "Oh, the poor tidbit! The poor cutlet!"

"I’m Beatrice," said Beatrice.

"Oh! How rude I am!" The little clown’s body followed her face right out of the tower window. She crawled in all her crinoline and sequins down the pink stones, face first and feet clinging to the plastic ivy. Her frills fell over her shoulders, revealing big polka-dot bloomers and spangled green tights. She did a neat flip near the bottom of the tower, and landed on her tiptoes on the ground.

Diodiance would die, Beatrice thought, almost grinning.

But the idea of Diodiance dying and waking up here made her feel oh, so very sick, so she frowned all the more blackly. The little clown, who looked as if she’d wanted to do a "Ta-da!" decided against it.

"I’m Rosie Rightly," she blatted instead. "Hello! Hi! Hello! Oh, Beatrice, it’s so good to see you! Welcome to Chuckle City! It’s a laugh a minute! All laughs, all the time! Come in! Come in!"

"How?" asked Beatrice. "Gate’s closed."

"Oh. Um." Rosie Rightly stared at the portcullis as if she’d never seen one before. Then she shrugged and banged a fist on the balloon-festooned grid. The grate creaked up slowly. Several balloons popped with the sound of bullets, reminding Beatrice of home, of the end of the olden days, back when the grown-ups had tried to contain the slaprash to one area. It hadn’t worked. The slaprash took all the grown-ups first. Even the ones with masks and guns.

"Easy-peasy," said Rosie Rightly, trying to usher Beatrice through the gate. Beatrice dug her feet in a little. "Only, you forget it’s there sometimes. Silly to have a gate here anyway. There’s only one city in all the whole Big Bah-Ha, and nothing beyond it. Nothing. Nothing. So why keep anyone out? Everyone wants in, don’t they? Why shouldn’t they?"

When Beatrice glanced uneasily at the sky, Rosie Rightly patted her hand. "They’re okay. The Gacy Boys live here. They belong to the Gray Harlequin. But sometime he lets them out to eat."

"What do they eat? If there’s nothin’ outside Chuckle City."

Rosie Rightly’s pink mouth formed a great big O. Then she stretched her lips over a toothy grimace and said, "Haven’t had one like you in a while. You’re one of those sparky-smarts, ain’t you?! That’s great! Only maybe it’d be better if you wasn’t. Not that you can help it. But come on!"

She slipped her little hand, gloved in pink net, her fingernails painted with sparkly green glitter, through Beatrice’s arm and tugged her through the open gate. Beatrice almost backed out again as the first wave of heat licked her face.

What she saw stopped her deader in her tracks.

Every building in Chuckle City was on fire.

§

Diodiance combat-crawled through the weeds for a better look. Seemed all clear, so she signaled the A-Okay to Tex, who slouched into a squat in the overgrown hydrangea behind her. Further down the road, Granny Two-Shoes lay in the gutter with Sheepdog Sal sitting "guard" nearby. Granny had her binoculars, so she saw what was about to happen, but it was too late to warn them, and besides — wasn’t it what they all wanted? So she watched, but did not set Sal to barking.

Diodiance strained her senses and took stock of the scene. Cardboard house — empty. Blue lawn chair — vacant. Emissary at the eastern gates — defected.

A worm of a scant of an inch closer. Adjust the thornstick sheathed in her belt loop. Squint. Sniff. Wipe nose on sleeve. Glance again.

The Flabberghast’s hut was an old refrigerator box with a green-and-gold silk sari thrown over it. Icicle lights all the colors of a crayon box dripped from its edges, the unplugged prongs dangling in the wind. Come dusk they’d light up. No one knew why.

Sometimes a frayed edge of the sari flapped aside, showing a palatial foyer just beyond the front flap. Marble halls. Portraits. Tapestries. Vases. The Tall Ones lived in two worlds at once, Beatrice used to say. Or more.

Pounding fist to dirt, Diodiance whispered, "It’s a wash." Then, louder, so Tex could tell the others, "Ain’t even a left-handed shadow to wave us hello! Granny? Sal? Tex, come on out here. No need to sneak. Flabby ain’t home."

Tex emerged from his blind, brushing leaves from his hair. Granny rode up on Sal’s back, clutching her fur like a mane. She dismounted beneath the arched entrance of the gravy yard, with its creakily swinging sign that said welcome to hillside in cut out letters.

Having seen what was to come from way back in her gutter, Little Granny Two-Shoes was the only Barka who did not jump when a great voice shattered the silence.

"Good afternoon, children!"

That voice was like a Slinky toy going downhill, like shouting into a well after someone fell in, like a piece of expensive caramel melting in a slant of afternoon sunlight. It was a voice that made Diodiance pirouette, and set a rigid scowl upon Tex’s brow. Sheepdog Sal began to bark. Little Granny Two-Shoes scratched her just beneath the jaw.

"By all the skulls of Arlington National Cemetery!" cried the Flabberghast. "If it isn’t the Barka Gang!"

They all turned to look. Banana-yellow shoes rocked about his feet like dinghies. Up. Legs as long as stilts and thin as straight pins in their loose white silk trousers. Up. Past a coat of sweeping peacock feathers, a vest of red brocade, a fine lawn cravat. Up, and up, and up to his white-painted face, his long black mouth, his long black eyes, those curls of flaming orange hair peeking out from beneath a sequined derby hat.

"And how may I help you?" asked the Flabberghast politely.

"Beatrice is dead," Tex blurted before Diodiance said something happy and solicitous.

"Ah."

"We need her stuff for a death rite. We’re pretty sure you have it."

"I see. Yes. That might prove … problematic."

Tex stepped forward with fists up, to show the Flabberghast the meaning of problematic, but Diodiance shoved him to the side before he got too close. He fell against Sheepdog Sal’s flank, and Sal turned to lick his wrist. Granny Two-Shoes took his hand in hers, and this more than anything stopped Tex from launching himself at the Flabberghast.

The Flabberghast gave no sign of noticing this altercation. His gaze had meandered beyond the Barka Gang. Beyond the black iron gates, a few of the Tall Ones left off their endless feasting and began to drift curiously toward them. The white lights on their shoulders flickered and burned.

The Flabberghast put a long white hand on top of Diodiance’s head. Blissfully, she leaned in.

"Allow me to offer armistice and hospitality. Come with me into my hut. As per the edicts stipulated in the original bargain between vestigial Homo sapiens and the Tall Ones, I shall not harm a single split hair on any one of your heads till the day you are marked to die. We must speak further of your Beatrice, but the situation is far too complex for casual graveside chatter. While I do not doubt my colleagues would find our forthcoming conversation stimulating, as civilized people, we may exercise the right to exclude whom we will from our private affairs. Do not you agree?"

"Ain’t goin’ in your stinky old house," Tex muttered.

"Fine," Diodiance snapped at him. "Stay outside, you cowardbaby. That’ll get Queen B her death rite quick enough."

"Aw, Di!"

Granny Two-Shoes, who still held his hand, now squeezed with intent. Tex allowed her to tug him into the cardboard hut after Diodiance, with Sheepdog Sal trotting behind, and the Flabberghast following last.

The first thing they saw, after the marble-floored foyer itself, was her skin.

It hung from one blank wall, stretched out and tacked there with silver nails. They knew the skin belonged to Beatrice because her hair was red. Not orange-red like the Flabberghast’s. Red like when a fire dies.

"Beatrice!" Diodiance screamed. This time Tex did punch the Flabberghast. Right in the knee.

The Flabberghast stumbled against a small table that held, among other things, a flensing tool and a familiar brown loafer (a scuffed size six, women’s) all under the coating of gray dust that comes from crunching bones. He hit the table’s edge and his peacock coat snarled him. Searching for purchase, his hands closed on air. This close up, he was not graceful. Not like he’d always seemed, sitting out in his blue lawn chair with his legs stretched before him like unfurled fire hoses.

Diodiance flinched against the wall, shielding Granny Two-Shoes with her body, Tex at her side, Beatrice’s skin at her back. Granny Two-Shoes saw something on the floor and bent to pick it up. Beatrice’s slingshot.

This put the Flabberghast between them and the door. He stood very still now, arms hanging loosely at his sides.

"You killed her!" Diodiance said. It wasn’t a sob, and it wasn’t a growl, but it was something like both.

"I do not eat the living," said the Flabberghast.

"You killed her and stripped her flesh and ate her bones."

The Flabberghast splayed one hand over his stomach. His diamond teeth gleamed and glinted, as if a spotlight in his belly shone up and out his throat, through his lips, casting rainbows all around him.

"She died at my feet," he said. "She was in the final stages when I found her. The slaprash marked her face, all down one side. Nothing to save. She was just that age." He shrugged, as if to say, "The rest you know. I am what I am."

Tex gnawed his lip to keep back a wail.

"I wish your Beatrice had come to me earlier," reflected the Flabberghast. "Those underground have informed us here of a matter in the deadlands that needs our immediate attention. Not being bound by the black iron gates, I am the only Tall One at liberty to perform the task. However. To do so, I shall need the help of a living child. Willing help, I should say. Otherwise, the door to the deadlands opens only one way, and I have no particular desire to be stuck on the far side of it. Had your Beatrice trusted me more, or perhaps loved you less, she would have done splendidly. She was so strong. Not fearless, but not one to fear foolishly. This journey would have prepared her for the one she now must undergo. Alas, she died too soon. I liked her. I might have used her to better purpose than as a lunchbox." He paused. "I don’t suppose any of you might volunteer to be of assis —"

"Never!" spat Diodiance through her tears. "Never, until the end of the end of the world! I’d sooner slap myself right now and bleed out bawlin’ murder!"

Hearing the quaver in her voice, Tex slung an arm around her, and stated, "Me, neither!"

His free hand grasped a stone in his pocket. He was already gauging distance, velocity, angle, wondering if Tall Ones felt pain like humans, if they had brains to concuss, if the great holes that were their eyes could be put out …

The Flabberghast turned those black-dark eyes on him. Tex’s hand went numb.

"A pity." The Flabberghast’s long fingers drummed the silver buttons on his red brocade vest. "For, in return for your ready collaboration, I would offer my brave adventurer a chance to see Beatrice again. I need to travel to a certain level of the deadlands, to the place she now resides. Only a child may bring me there. And only a living child may bring me out again."

A bark, and Tex and Diodiance sprang apart. Granny Two-Shoes, once again mounted like a maharani atop Sheepdog Sal, came forward. Her thin blond hair had not been combed in two days. There was chocolate on her face from the icing she’d eaten for breakfast, a cut on her knee where she’d fallen that morning. But her eyes were steady, blue as the Flabberghast’s were black, and she held out her hand. He stared down at her.

"Even in an epoch that deplores such conventions," said he, "and though you are by far the most superior three-year-old representative of your species I have ever come across, I cannot help but feel that you are not quite of an age to consent." His long black mouth twisted a little as if he wanted to say something more. Instead he flipped his palm like a playing card. When Granny laid her own hand there, he bowed over it.

"You are very brave. And I thank you for the offer, but —"

Tex barged forward, breaking their link of flesh. "Think you can stop her, Flabby? You? Stop Granny Two-Shoes?" And he laughed a laugh like wet tissue paper tearing. "You can’t keep Granny from her Beatrice, and you can’t keep us from Granny. If she’s a-goin’, I’m a-goin’."

"I’ll go, too," Diodiance announced, stepping away from the wall. "We’ll do Queen B’s death rite to her face. We’ll say goodbye." She didn’t look over her shoulder at that horrible skin.

"My stars!" cried the Flabberghast. "What enterprising children you are! What pioneering spirits! What gumption. You don’t faint at the sight of blood, do you?"

They all glared at him, wearing, between them, more scab than rags, and he grinned, and the marble foyer of the cardboard hut danced with the rainbows cast by his diamond teeth.

"Of course not," he murmured. "How silly of me."

The Flabberghast held up his left hand, folding thumb and fingers into palm, all except for his pinkie. This he held erect like a spindle, and the Barka Gang saw that his long nail was sparkling clear as his teeth.

"I’ll just need a drop of your blood," he explained. "Your canine companion’s, too, if you wish her to accompany us."

One by one, at the Flabberghast’s direction, they pricked the soft spot at the center of their wrists, and the tip of Sal’s panting tongue, too, and filed over to the stretched skin on the wall. They pressed their blood upon it. Diodiance signed her name. Tex made a big "T." Granny drew something that could have been a flower or a bone or a bullet. Sheepdog Sal licked the place where Beatrice’s big toe had been.

The Flabberghast himself scored open his own palm. The hut filled with a smell that drowned the copper trickle of mortal blood in citrus-wine-wildflower-campfire-tidewater-leaf, and what leaked out of his skin was black like his eyes, and like his eyes full of tiny, whirling lights.

The blackness spread over Beatrice’s stretched skin, overwhelming the tiny dots of blood like raindrops converging on a windowpane. The drop becomes a stream, the stream a puddle, the puddle a lake. The blackness spread. And Beatrice’s skin became a door.

Granny Two-Shoes was the first one to step through.

§

Every building in Chuckle City was on fire. The buildings were tenements, and from their high, flaming windows rained a constant bombardment of grotesque little clowns. They smashed on the cobblestones below. Sometimes they jumped right up from the stones and dragged themselves back into the burning buildings to do the thing all over again. More often they just lay there and writhed on the cracked stones, ragged clothes smoking, the white greasepaint on their faces gray with soot, red noses charred. They twitched.

In the middle of Main Street, a skinny girl in a monkey mask, or perhaps a skinny monkey in a girl suit, cranked out "Ode to Joy" on her hurdy-gurdy. Beatrice shivered. The whole city smelled like ash.

"Isn’t it FUNNY?" asked Rosie Rightly. "Isn’t it a RIOT?"

Beatrice looked at her with solemn eyes. "You think that’s funny?"

But Rosie Rightly was undaunted, or seemed to be. "It’s always funny when things fall out a window."

Another bright upchuck of screaming bodies hit the pavement. A tiny clown near Beatrice’s feet made a burbling sound that might have been laughter. Beatrice really did not think it was.

"Look at them bounce!" screamed Rosie Rightly. "Ga-DOING! Ga-DOING!"

When Beatrice did not respond, Rosie Rightly patted her on the shoulder. "Don’t worry your warts, Bee-Bee-licious. You can’t kill the dead. They’re fine. They’re all fine." She pushed a lock of blue hair from her forehead. "So just relax. Have a laugh, would you?" Her lips trembled. "Please?"

Beatrice studied the bodies on the ground. Heaps of little clowns. Smoldering.

Just like this two years ago, she remembered, when the slaprash first came to town. For a while the grown-ups tried to put up some kind of … quartermain? Or, calamine … She forgot what Dad had called it. Roadblocks at all entrances and exits. To keep the slaprash in. To prevent panicked folks from getting out.

At first they tried burying their dead in big pits, then they were just burning them, but soon there weren’t enough grown-ups left to do any of that. Fires got out of control. Whole neighborhoods burned down. That was when the soldiers came. They didn’t last long, either. None of the grown-ups lasted. The slaprash took them all and left the children behind. With a lot of bullet casings and bones.

"First comes the handprint

Then comes the flush

Then come the shaky-shakes

All — in — a — rush!

Breath starts to rattle

Like dice in a cup

And the slaprash’ll getcha

When — you’re — all — growed — up!"

Beatrice slammed her hands over her ears and shook off the nasty din of jump ropes. Worst thing in a long list of bad that the Rubberbaby Gang ever did, inventing that jump rope rhyme and spreading it ‘round. Their leader Aunt Oolalune, nearly Beatrice’s age, remembered all the rhymes from the olden days, Seuss and Silverstein, Gorey and Lear. The kiddy gangs loved her for her rhymes, but especially that one. It was their own, the only gravestone they’d get. Forget "Ring Around the Rosie" and "Susie Has a Steamboat." "The Slaprash Rhyme," like its namesake, went viral, went everywhere. What Dad would’ve called ubittinus. No, that wasn’t the word.

Beatrice watched the little clowns scrape themselves off the ground and trudge into the burning buildings. Flames swallowed them. Bodies plummeted from high windows. The gleeful (or not) screaming began again.

Beatrice turned to Rosie Rightly, who grinned her manic grin. "Whaddya think, Bee-Bee?"

"Is this it, Rosie? This all there is?"

"We-ell." Rosie Rightly squirmed like she had to pee. "I could show you something else, sure! There’s lots of great things here. It’s Chuckle City! It’s a laugh a minute. Like, like, look at these guys! The rustics! I love me some rustics!" She pointed at an approaching ambulance. "These guys are FUNNY. Wait and see!"

The tiny ambulance whizzed past them. Three rustics hung from its windows. They wore straw hats and overalls, glasses without lenses, fake tufts of white hair glued to their chins. Their faces were contorted in identical expressions of constipation. The ambulance itself was locomotioned by no engine but the hustle of their bare feet. When the feet stopped moving, the ambulance dropped, neatly squashing one of the supine victims of the tenement fires.

From beneath the steel frame came a soft moan. A splatter of bodies later and the moan was lost to the tautophony of the scene. The rustics climbed out of their ambulance, cursing one another’s clumsiness.

"If ya’ll’d dropped it over there, Mr. Wick, we could’ve smushed two!"

"Weren’t two bodies lying close enough together for that, Mr. Jones."

"Could’ve waited, Mr. Gibbs. More come down every second, like bird poop!"

They clustered around the smushed clown like farmers at a town hall meeting, discussing blight.

"Broked, Mr. Wick!" said one.

"Backbone clean severed, Mr. Gibbs!" said another.

"What to do, Mr. Jones?" asked a third.

"I know!" answered the first. "Let’s make balloon aminals!"

"Balloon aminals! Oh, yay!" squealed Rosie Rightly, dancing around Beatrice, who tried not to feel sick. "BULLY! Oh, they’re great, Bee-Bee! You’re going to love them!"

From pockets, hats, folds of cuffs, rolls of socks, the rustics drew out flaccid balloon skins and began inflating them with such gust and vigor that behind fake beards and empty glasses frames, their smooth young faces turned purple, and puce, and orange. Soon the balloons humped up, took on vivid, twisted shapes, the shapes of things best left under beds and in the dark of closets, and they grew large and larger, aerial sculptures that vied for the greatest ghoulishness. Only when they became truly huge and horrible did the rustics at last tie them off, whipping out black Sharpies from their bibs to scribble in teeth, eyes, scales, claws. Soon the balloons were not balloons at all, but buoyant beasts that turned on their makers and began chomping at them. The rustics tried to fight them off, but were snapped up, shaken apart, eaten, spat out again.

Rosie Rightly no longer danced. She stared at the balloons with an expression of abject misery. But she did not move.

Beatrice stumbled back from the bright melee, dragging Rosie Rightly by her pink chiffon princess sleeve.

"Let’s go, Rosie. Show me the way out of Chuckle City. You can come, too. I’ll take care of you, I —"

"Too late." Rosie Rightly’s tinsel-lashed eyes were bright with tears she could no longer cry, but her never-ending smile showed a full crescent of teeth. "It’s the Big Bah-Ha for me and for you, lambikin, unless —"

A balloon aminal loomed too close, leering. Beatrice batted at it with a fist and pulled Rosie Rightly out of range behind a charred building. Rosie Rightly began to slump against the wall, but Beatrice took her blue head between her hands and pressed their foreheads together.

"Focus. We have to stay in the Big Bah-Ha, you said, unless …?"

Rosie Rightly fiddled with her gloves. They had torn in the scuffle. Beatrice saw her wrists through the pink net, where two large wounds glowed as red as coals. Seeing her look, Rosie Rightly clasped her hands behind her.

"Unless," she stammered, "the — the Gray Harlequin releases you. There’s a place beyond the mirror, but — but it’s so hard. Hard to get there. Too hard."

They stared at each other, clown and girl. Beatrice tried to interpret Rosie Rightly’s expression. The shine of her very-nearly-tears had already vanished. Her smile was fixed. She tore her puffy pink sleeve from Beatrice’s grip and fluffed it up again.

"Poor Bee-Bee," she giggled. "So serious all the time! If you want, I’ll take you to the Gray Harlequin. He’s probably by the mirror. Always looking into it, and no wonder, for he’s the prettiest clown of all. He wears the August Crown. I think he’s been here forever. Or at least," she added, "since I arrived. Same thing."

§

"This is where dead kids have to go? The Big Bah-Ha?" Diodiance scanned the lay of the land, her round brown eyes skeptical. "Maybe I’ll just become a Tall One instead. Wear a white light on my shoulder. Eat some bones. I tell ya, Tex, our good ol’ gravy yard is lookin’ like a big bucketful of screamin’ monkey-fun from where I’m standin’."

Tex scratched under his left arm. "Look there." He pointed to a sunken gray groove where an empty sock ringed in rusty lace lay. Picking it up, he put it in his pocket.

"Very astute," breathed the Flabberghast. "What keen eyes you have, Young Texas! Like the Prince of Peregrines, you watch the world below."

"Shut up, Flabby," said Tex.

The Flabberghast crossed his arms, portraying nonchalance not very well at all. The corner of his mouth got up a tic. His peacock coat swung with the force of his shrug. All the Tall Ones wore white lights upon their shoulders, but the top of the Flabberghast’s coat sleeve carried only a scorch mark. The Barka Gang used to spend whole nights speculating where that light had gone.

"Children," he observed in a hurt voice, "too often take the aggressive myth of the Napoleon complex to an unbecoming extreme."

Granny Two-Shoes cleared her throat. It made a sound in the dead gray air like a wooden spoon banged with no particular rhythm against a plastic bucket. She put her hand over her heart. Had it missed a beat? Was this dying? Was she dead?

The Flabberghast’s painted-on creases softened when he gazed at her. "No. Not yet, Miss Granny. But our time here must perforce be limited, for these are the deadlands, and you must not lavish them too long with the extravagance of your living youth. Perhaps in the past, you might have stayed a trifle longer, but the very equivalence of air here seems sucked dry. This land," he sighed, "is too much changed from what it was."

Granny Two-Shoes paused to nuzzle her face against Sheepdog Sal’s brown fur. In return for this she received a reassuring lick. It cleared her head.

In these deadlands, thought Granny Two-Shoes, might merely being alive mean being too alive? Are we flaunting our liveliness to these dead gray skies? Are we attracting the attention of the dead? Can the dead harm the living? What does harm mean here, where hurt doesn’t necessarily stop with the cessation of a heartbeat? Where there is no hope of healing?

The Flabberghast caught her eye and held a finger to his lips. Hush was implied, but all he said aloud was, "Check your cuts, children," in a voice that even Tex obeyed.

Diodiance dabbed at her wrist, at the place she had torn it against the Flabberghast’s fingernail. "Still bleedin’."

"Good," said the Flabberghast. "We can stay here until your scab forms and closes. Keep a lively eye upon it. And another on the sky."

Tex’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. "What’re we lookin’ for?"

For answer, Granny Two-Shoes threw out her arms and flapped so vigorously she almost fell off of Sheepdog Sal. Sal turned around in circles, trying to keep her rider astride.

"Bad birds?" Diodiance guessed.

"Sad birds," Tex corrected.

"Not birds at all," said the Flabberghast. "But" — he bowed to Granny Two-Shoes — "I am impressed."

Nothing more was said on the subject. The Flabberghast unfurled his hands in a herding gesture and once more they all started moving along the gray groove. Tex and Diodiance marched at the vanguard, taking inventory of their pockets, swapping out what they didn’t want with each other. PayDay candy bars for watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers, bullet casings for smooth pebbles, bones for crayons. A happy breeze riffled their hair like a mother’s fingers, conveying sunshine and safety and the promise of joyful rest. Gone too soon.

The Flabberghast, taking up the rear, sniffed for traces of that breeze when it departed. He frowned at what lingered.

Equidistant between them, Granny Two-Shoes rode Sheepdog Sal at a pleasant trot. She didn’t bother listening in on Tex’s and Diodiance’s conversation, which she generally considered comfortable white noise to stimulate her own ruminations. She didn’t look over her shoulder to see what shenanigans the Flabberghast got up to; he had his own agenda, and it was not hers. But she did check the twin holsters she wore beneath her nightgown. One for her switchblade. One for Beatrice’s slingshot. She was ready for anything.

§

Rosie Rightly led Beatrice away from the burning buildings. They passed a dusty little market square with tattered awnings over abandoned booths that read, "TENDER LEONARD’S JOKES AND GAGS!" and "SOLOMON SOT’S SOCIETY OF CAREFREE KIDDIES!" and "FRABJOUS THE FOOL’S POPULAR PUPPETS!"

"Where is everyone?"

Rosie Rightly shrugged. "Those’re the clowns that did their job. Made the kids laugh, helped ‘em move on. When the kids moved on, so did they. That’s why the Big Bah-Ha’s here — ’cause it’s never funny when a kid dies. We have to learn to laugh again, before we can go through … to whatever’s next."

"That’s what all the clowns are for?" asked Beatrice.

Rosie Rightly nodded. "That’s what they were for, way back before I got here. I think the Big Bah-Ha was different then. But that’s done with. The Gray Harlequin says we’re all clowns now."

Beatrice tugged one of her braids. One of her ribbons was missing, and another had gone all loosey-goosey. The thought of losing another ribbon gave her a sick jolt of panic. She tightened it fiercely. The panic receded.

"Were you always a clown, Rosie?"

"No," Rosie Rightly sighed. "I just … never learned to laugh." She touched her painted face.

"Oh."

Rosie Rightly started skipping. Her flounces flounced. Her sequins flashed. Everything about her was gleeful with cheer, except her round blue eyes. She pointed at the dusty market with glittering fingernails.

"I know it looks all sad and dusty and stuff. But really it’s GREAT! It means that if we do our jobs, then someday, we can go back to the mirror. Take a look at ourselves again. Tell ourselves, we brought joy to the joyless. We deserve the next world, too. And this time, this time, we’ll be able to meet our own eyes without flinching. We’ll know we’re worthy. Like Solly Sot, and Frabjoojooface, and Lenny, and Sudsy Aimee, and Snotty Sue. They did it. They learned to see themselves as something other than dead. They got through. I will too. Someday."

Beatrice nodded, frowning. "Is that hard? Seein’ yourself?"

"It’s the hardest. You look in the mirror the first time, and all you see —" Rosie Rightly gulped. "But the Gray Harlequin says …" Here she stopped, shook herself. Poked Beatrice in the ribs. "Hey. Bee-Bee. You think I’m funny? You do, right? You think I’m the funniest?"

Beatrice patted her gloved hand, avoiding the luminous wound on her wrist. "Keep tryin’, Rosie."

Rosie Rightly hunched her shoulders. They were just coming upon a section of Chuckle City where a colossal tent loomed larger than any three of the burning tenements put together. The tent’s canvas was striped red and white like the barber’s pole Beatrice had seen in her first moments of the Big Bah-Ha. Red and white. Blood and bone. Near the curtained-off entrance, a twinkling Ferris wheel turned and turned into eternity.

"That’s the Big Top," Rosie Rightly whispered. Her expression said she wanted to scurry by, but her feet dragged to a standstill. "The tramps live there. They ride tigers and swing from wires." A shiver wracked her. Beatrice could see the raised bumps beneath her painted flesh.

"When you’re inside the Big Top and you look up, all you see are spiderwebs. The Eleven Lovely Emilies spin them, web on web. The Emilies all have beautiful red hair, like yours." Rosie Rightly’s eyes lingered on Beatrice’s hair. "And they have red eyes like hourglasses, and four arms and four legs apiece. They spin nets to catch the tramps should they chance to tumble from their wires. Whenever a tramp falls, the Eleven Lovely Emilies can eat. Their red tongues go all the way down to here!" Rosie Rightly touched her tummy.

Like Dad’s dark ladygods, Beatrice thought, with their many limbs, and scarlet mouths, and the way they could eat whole armies.

Beatrice did not want to see the Emilies. Not without Dad at her side to explain them. Sure, in legends the ladygods could be brought to compassion, to show a mercy as miraculously ardent as their appetites. But no mercy remained here in the Big Bah-Ha, she thought, else Chuckle City would long since have been razed to dust.

"Do you want to see them?" Rosie asked, as if afraid of the answer.

Whatever Dad’s old ‘cyclopedia used to say, these Eleven Lovely Emilies could only be hideous. If Beatrice saw them, she knew her heart would break. She tightened her ribbon again.

"I want to see the Gray Harlequin," she said.

Rosie Rightly began to bounce on the balls of her feet. "We could do that, or … Or! Or! Or!"

"Or?"

"Instead of seeing the G-gray Harlequin, we could go to the petting zoo!"

Beatrice vaguely remembered petting zoos from the olden days. Sad sheep and decrepit llamas, dirty chickens running underfoot, rabbits in cages, bristly pigs setting the stable a-snore, and the whole place smelling earthy and unsavory. But the animals were pretty neat-o. They ate from the palm of your hand.

"Sometimes," Rosie Rightly nattered on, "the Gacy Boys go big game hunting out beyond Chuckle City. They bag prizes to bring back — and that’s the petting zoo."

Beatrice did not remind Rosie Rightly of her first assertion — that nothing lived in the Big Bah-Ha outside Chuckle City. No place but here. But if the Gacy Boys could fly beyond these walls, she wondered if she might scale them. Was there a back door? If she ran free, would the Gacy Boys bag her next, and bring her back to put in their petting zoo, and feed her to the beasts trapped there?

"At night, in the arena under the Big Top, the Gray Harlequin will pit one of the petting zoo against his prize tigers. Or sometimes against one of us! It’s stu-stupendous! Action-packed! Irresistible. Wanna see?"

"No," said Beatrice, very firmly. "I don’t like fights."

"You don’t like anything!"

Back with her Barka Gang, Beatrice had fought several battles against the Rubberbaby Gang and Aunt Oolalune. The skirmishes were usually quick and dirty. The weapons were grab-what-you-can. Sticks, stones, switchblades, slingshots. Rules were generally, "First blood ends the fight / Whoever’s not bleeding wins." But of course, first blood had a tendency to enrage and incite. Often it was followed by second blood, and third blood, until there was blood everywhere, and the Tall Ones were slavering at the gravy yard gates in the hopes that their next meal succumbed to death sooner than the slaprash scything it down.

How could any such rule as "first blood" apply here, where nothing bled? You could be burned, smushed, and ripped apart, but you’d still go on and on. Like the fires, and the balloon animals, and Rosie Rightly’s grin. Horrors without end.

"I wanna see the Gray Harlequin," said Beatrice grimly.

"All riii-iiight." Rosie Rightly drooped. "If you’re sure."

"Sure as spit means a promise."

"It’s just …"

"What?"

"You’re gonna have to look in the mirror before he’ll meet you, and I just don’t think you’re ready, I really don’t." Rosie Rightly’s grin bent upsy-daisy of itself. "You don’t want to — to — get stuck here, Bee-Bee. Like me. And the rest. You still have time. You might learn how to laugh again before you go and look." She canted her pink-gloved hands helplessly. "Maybe I could try a cartwheel? I usually fall. Bam! Right on my face. Maybe you’ll think that’s funny?"

Beatrice shook her head. "I’m sorry, Rosie. I know this ain’t my territory. I know I’m new and don’t have all the rules down straight. But I guess I’m used to dealin’ with leaders. You say the Gray Harlequin runs things? He’s the one I gotta see. ‘Cause I ain’t puttin’ on no red nose and sweatin’ blood for laughs. There has to be another way outta here." She shrugged. "I’ll find it. I’m good at that."

"Maybe you were before," Rosie Rightly whispered.

Beatrice nudged her, even tried a wink. "Hey," she said. "I brought myself along with me when I died, didn’t I? That’s the sum of somethin’."

But Rosie Rightly would not be comforted.

§

Tex sniffed the air as they slipped beneath the portcullis. "Smells like bad eggs."

"Sulfur," the Flabberghast said absently. "And brimstone. So picturesque."

Diodiance stood en pointe in her tennis shoes. Widened her nostrils. Nodded agreement. "Reminds me of our Rotten Egg War. Who won that one again?"

"Aunt Oolalune. But we got her back the next week at the Battle of the Baseball Diamond. Sent her howlin’ back to her side of town. Remember —"

Diodiance shushed him. Pointed. "What’re those?"

Granny Two-Shoes petted Sheepdog Sal. Balloons, she thought through her stroking hands. Bad balloons.

Seven sharp barks, staccato, conveyed the message to their comrades.

"Balloons?" was all Tex got out before the first one dove upon them.

"Flee!" cried the Flabberghast. "I will hold them off!"

Springing at the yawning purple maw that snapped with black piranha teeth, the Flabberghast raked its bulbous sides with his thin white hands. The balloon whipped around and pounced at his back, squeaking like a tricycle left too long out in the rain. Two more balloons joined it: one tiger-striped with the long neck of an ostrich, one with the face of a bear and the body of a snake.

Then — POP!

Tex had turned out his pockets of rocks and pointy bullet casings and began to bang that artillery — pop-pop-whap! — right into the polychromatic fray. Beatrice used to say how she bet Tex’d been a Junior League pitcher back in the olden days. He couldn’t rightly know either way, but ever since the world ended, his aim had just improved.

Diodiance unstrapped the thornstick from the loop on her belt, and — BLAM! WHAP! POP! — laid about her. Even Granny Two-Shoes jumped perch, snatching the switchblade from its sheath to thrust it up into the air. WHAP! POP! KERBLOOEY! Sheepdog Sal rose to her hind legs, lunging and gnashing with far greater gusto than any measly thin-skinned balloon beast. Pop! Pop! Wheeeeeeeze! went the whistling things as they rocketed away, deflating as they died.

Suddenly the air was still again. Gray and still. The cobblestones of Chuckle City were littered with rainbow skins. Diodiance whooped out the Barka Gang’s war cry and chanted, "Tex! Tex! Our boy’s the best! Fastest arm in the whole Midwest!"

Leaping up and down Main Street in those great gazelle arcs she’d learned in ballet, Diodiance hollered, "Jeté! Jeté! Tour jeté!" and landed back in front of them with a mighty ululation. Tex received her clap on the back with a sweaty grin, picking up his stones and bullet casings and pocketing them again. He caught Granny’s eye, who returned his gaze with blazing blue solemnity, and said, "Thanks for the warning, Granny Two-Shoes."

Granny tugged at his camo cutoffs, shrugged, smiled. Her baby teeth were white as Diodiance’s tyranny and fluoride toothpaste could make them, except for the iron gray one in the middle. Dead at the root, Beatrice had said. The Rubberbabies did that, that time they took her for their slave.

"Hey!" Diodiance stopped dancing. "Where’s the Flabberghast anyway?"

"Who cares?" Tex muttered.

Granny Two-Shoes pointed down a street, where the Flabberghast crouched near a tiny ambulance. Balloon skins hung all about his person, making motley of his peacock coat. He appeared to be prodding something with his long fingers, which the Barka Gang, joining him, saw to be the painted head of a small clown. The rest of its body was crushed to death under the ambulance.

"Are you hopin’ the head’ll pop off?" Tex stiffened to kick him. "Gettin’ hungry, are you?"

"This is not a body. Not really. And I do not eat souls. It is forbidden."

The Tall One almost sounded regretful. He tugged off his lawn cravat and used it to scrub the dead clown’s small face. Off came the ash. Off came the paint. Off came the singed red nose, the curly wig. The child was pale and bald, with sunken eyes the same gray as the sky. As everything.

"Leukemia," the Flabberghast said. "From long before the slaprash. Here, you see? The ravages of her treatment? She’s been in the Big Bah-Ha awhile. It must have been a harsh death to keep her here so long, and then when the Gray Harlequin came, she found herself fixed. Like the rest of them. Insects on his corkboard. Poor little butterfly."

His voice had dropped like he was talking to himself, but the Barkas leaned in, paying close attention. "Those underground said the situation here was dire, but the others did not heed their voices. They mocked me when I paced before the gates and worried. They called my frowns the best jest yet. But I was right to come when I did — no matter how questionable my methods."

Granny Two-Shoes knelt beside him and closed the clown’s gray eyes. The Flabberghast smiled at her softly, teeth sparkling.

"You are a good girl, Granny Two-Shoes," he said. "Would that you were a Tall One, and I could stay your friend forever."

"Seems to me," Tex grunted, "the dead shouldn’t have to die twice. Not like this — no death rite, no shrine, no gang to go and sing her final lullaby. It just seems wrong."

Diodiance scowled. "Queen B’d call this whole darn place ice cream."

Granny looked up sharply. Sheepdog Sal barked twice. Diodiance corrected herself. "Sorry. I mean obscene."

"Beatrice would be perfectly correct."

The Flabberghast stood up. The Tall One had never seemed so tall. The Barkas each thought, but did not say aloud, that the sky of the Big Bah-Ha might crack if he jumped.

"What happens when a child dies?" he asked them.

"Well, Flabby, you go and eat ‘em."

Diodiance jabbed Tex in the ribs. "Tex, that’s rude. He’s tryin’ to help us."

"We’re here to help him, you mean!"

The Flabberghast calmed her with a wave of his white hand. "Peace, Miss Diodiance. That is indeed what we do. We eat the bones. But what manner of being, one might ask, eats what’s left when the bones are gone? What kind of carrion monster eats the haeccitas? The thisness of being? The soul?" He paused, and into his pause came the rushing of a hundred wings. Behind his slender shoulders a shadow moved across the sky, too fast and too low for a cloud.

"Gacy Boys," he noted. Then, "How are your scabs, children?"

"Still runny," said Diodiance. "Startin’ to scratch some at the edges. Queen B says that means healin’s a-comin’ close up, makin’ you itch."

The Flabberghast nodded. "There is still time. But not much." He pointed to the dead clown on the ground. "The Gacy Boys will try to take this little soul away and bring it where it will be devoured and lost to all memory. Will you let this happen?"

"No!" cried Tex and Diodiance as one. Sheepdog Sal growled. Granny Two-Shoes unsheathed her switchblade again.

"Then stand," urged the Flabberghast as gray wings beat around them. "Let us drive these boybirds back to the sky and pursue where they flee. This is the beginning of the end."

§

In a field at the edge of Chuckle City, two massive elephants danced. Rampant, they stood on the great columns of their hind legs, their forelegs rearing to create the crest of an archway. Two opposite pairs of flat feet pressed together, without a seam in the stone to show where one elephant ended and the other began. Ears flared like frozen wings. Tails neither hung straight down nor jerked erect, but seemed caught in a jaunty swish. Their long trunks met, entwining skyward like a single great tree. The inner curves of their hulking bodies supported a mirror.

Had it lain flat, Beatrice might have mistaken the mirror for a lake. Warped and rippled, smoky with age and fissures, the vast glass reflected nothing that stood at any distance from it.

"Where is the Gray Harlequin?" asked Beatrice. "Where are the Gacy Boys?"

Rosie Rightly clung to her elbow. "I don’t know, Bee-Bee. He’s always near here. He lives just outside the arch."

Involuntarily, Beatrice remembered someone else who lived just outside a great stone arch. She would have shuddered, but the dread inside her could not make her flesh creep or her hair stand on end. I’m not really flesh anymore, she thought. My hair is just the memory of my hair.

"I never liked it here," Rosie said, teeth chattering.

Beatrice wanted to tell Rosie that she was not really cold; she would never be cold again, but she held her tongue. My memory of a tongue, she corrected herself.

"I can’t — I can’t go with you. I don’t want to use up my last chance. I’m not ready! I’m not happy yet."

"Hush, it’s all right." Beatrice spoke in the voice she’d used whenever Granny Two-Shoes woke her up with a midnight crying jag. Granny did not wake often, but when she did, it was bad. She cried like she was the last little girl left alive in the whole wide world. "It’s all right. I can go by myself."

Leaving Rosie Rightly hunched on the low hill, hands clasped over the radiant wounds on her wrists, painted head bowed, Beatrice descended.

The incline had quickened her pace, or perhaps it was her body that seemed to grow lighter. The stone elephants were the first beautiful things Beatrice had seen in the Big Bah-Ha. Regal and welcoming, they seemed to smile. They made her stand straighter and remember one of Dad’s favorite words. Dignity. Right up to the mirror she walked, patting a huge hoof nail on her way, and stared into it.

At first she saw only a crack. It was small, a golden ribbon against the gray. Dancing light reached out from the crack and tickled her face like a breeze. It gladdened her eyes, made her skin feel a flush of true warmth. She wanted to put her mouth to the crack and suck the joy all the way into her. Put her ear to it and hear Dad’s voice again. Because he would be there, where the gold was. She knew he would.

But Beatrice thought, No. I must focus. I must look at myself. So she took a half step back.

And cried out at the dead thing she saw.

She was really, truly dead. Cold, small, lightless, breathless, heartless, quenched. Indistinguishable from anything else that had ever lived and died. There was nothing luminous about her except the ugly red handprint mantling her gray face like some hellish lobster. Beatrice scratched it. She scraped and clawed, but the handprint would not come off, and Beatrice fell to her knees and covered her eyes so that she would not have to bear herself, her dead self, her never-to-be-anything-else-ever-again self, one second longer.

A gentle hand touched her shoulder. It’s Dad, she thought, and flung herself into his arms. She pressed her face into his silver scales, sobbing without tears.

"Oh," she said a moment later, edging away. "Sorry."

"Do not be ashamed," the creature answered. "I am here to succor you."

"You’re the Gray Harlequin."

"Yes."

Slim and supple as the Flabberghast, not quite as tall perhaps, but tall enough. Skin that glittered as if a million silver sequins overlapped him. A black velvet ribbon wrapped the upper part of his face like a bandit mask — only it had no slits for eyes.

Beatrice wasn’t sure he had eyes, although she felt certain he was watching her. A cloth of diaphanous saffron silk wound his body like a toga, clasped at his left shoulder by a glass bird that glowed from the white light inside it, and knotted into a saffron rose at his right hip. The rest billowed to his feet.

The crown upon his brow was part thorn, part berry, part leaf-bell-branch-bird’s-nest, part flower, part pale pink seashell. Wings grew from it, and antlers, and the soft ears of some small brown creature. This must be, then, what Rosie Rightly had called the August Crown. It proclaimed the Gray Harlequin Lord of the Big Bah-Ha. King of Clowns.

To see that crown was to feel its weight. Beatrice fell to her knees, thinking even as they scraped down, I never kneel. Not in defeat. Not to anyone. I pummeled Aunt Oolalune when she tried to make me. Why now?

"Do you come to ask a boon, little one?" The Gray Harlequin’s voice was warm as maple-flavored corn syrup on a cold December morning.

"I want to leave." Beatrice spoke to the ground, hating herself for muttering. "I want to see my dad. I don’t want to stay here anymore."

The Gray Harlequin made a sound between a cluck and a tsk. She risked a look up at him. He shook his glittering head to and fro.

"I am afraid," said he, "that rules are rules. You looked into your own face, but you did not laugh. The best I can offer you now is a place here in Chuckle City. You might join the tramps under the Big Top. Ride the tigers. Learn to walk the wires." He chuckled. A splatter of hot syrup. Bodies falling from a burning building.

"Or perhaps the Eleven Lovely Emilies will take you up, up, up into their webs and teach you how to spin. How to measure time by a red hourglass. How to eat what falls into your snares." He stooped to cup her chin before she could jerk away. "Or you can blow balloons with the rustics, or immolate yourself with the grotesques. Although, from the look of you, I’d say you’ve seen enough burning."

He laid his hand over the handprint on her face. She could feel the fit, how his fingers conformed to the slaprash’s shape exactly. This time, Beatrice did flinch, but he grasped her by the jaw and did not let her go.

"But you cannot leave my city, little Beatrice," said the Gray Harlequin. Beatrice closed her eyes when he smiled. "And you cannot move forward through the mirror. Unless you want to take another look? Go on. Of all the children who have passed through the Big Bah-Ha, surely you are neither the most wretched, nor the saddest. Go on." His ruby lips curled like vipers. "Look. And smile at what you see."

It was a dare and a command. Releasing her jaw, he flung her forward. Beatrice dragged herself to her feet, pressed both fists to the glass, leaned in, looked. Her reflection sprang at her like a monster. She flung herself back, once again tearing at the slaprash on her face, trying to dig it from her flesh.

"Make it go away!"

"That," smiled the Gray Harlequin, "I can do."

So he pressed her once more to her knees, and she went, docile now. And he smeared white paint on her dull gray face, and painted a single blue tear beneath her right eye to represent all the tears she could no longer cry. From his saffron robes he drew a round red sponge attached to two white strings, and he placed the sponge over her nose and knotted the strings behind her head. He told her to look into the mirror a third time, now that he had made all things well.

Beatrice obeyed. Her reflection had grown bearable, although in wearing the red nose, she could no longer smell the warm gold wind pouring through the mirror’s cracked surface. She reached up to unknot the strings that held the nose affixed. The Gray Harlequin slapped her hand.

"Now, Beatrice. That’s no way for a clown to behave!"

Once more he began securing the strings behind her head, but before he had quite finished, the Gray Harlequin gave a loud shout and jumped back. The red nose tumbled from her face. Beatrice made only a half-hearted attempt to catch it, ashamed for being so relieved at its absence.

Above her, the Gray Harlequin hissed, shaking out his hand like it had been stung.

A sharpened shell casing bounced off Beatrice’s foot. She began to smile. Then the sky opened.

Overhead, thirty-three ravens exploded into being. Dropping to the ground around the Gray Harlequin so quickly they drew from the air a thunderclap, they threw back their gray feathers and became young men. Hangman’s hoods were thrust back, revealing ivory eyes and ebony teeth and coxcombs that writhed like Medusa’s snakes. Instead of clothes, their bodies were wrapped like mummies in gaffer’s tape. One wore half of a pair of handcuffs like a bracelet. Another, a length of heavy chain for a belt. Their throats were as radiant a red as Beatrice’s nose, red as the wounds on Rosie Rightly’s wrists.

"Well?" asked the Gray Harlequin. "Where is my meat and drink? In all of Chuckle City, did not one of my little subjects relinquish their last hope?"

The Gacy Boys spoke in a ragged chorus of whispers and whistles. Their voices ran together. Beatrice could only pick out fragments.

"A nice, fresh one, sire — a grotesque from the tenements, but…"

"Intruders —"

"Driven off —"

"Three heartbeats, with weapons. Rocks. Knives. Sticks —"

"One, tarted like a clown, but far too tall —"

"A dog, sire, with terrible teeth —"

"A dog?" Beatrice pushed past the line of Gacy Boys, would have marched right to Chuckle City to see for herself, but the Gray Harlequin shoved her to the ground.

"Stay where you are!" he growled.

"Sire," said a Gacy Boy, "they were right behind us."

Beatrice, choking on a mouthful of dust, tried to raise her head. But the Gray Harlequin had stepped upon it. She could only turn it to one side. Beyond the forest of Gacy Boy legs, several familiar pairs of feet moved toward her.

First: white tennies, worn with more grace than a pair of satin ballet slippers. Second: scuffed and scarred combat boots, boys’ size eight. Third: a pair of pink patent leather Mary Janes smaller than a Snickers bar. Fourth: four brown paws, dusty and dear. Fifth and last: two banana-yellow boats.

"It’s my Barkas," Beatrice whispered. "But how did …?"

"Oh, hallo, Harlequin!" cried the Flabberghast. "So good to behold your blindfold again! A few of us wondered where you’d gone when the hills opened up and the world was ours. How is your hand? Necessity demanded the damage; we hope you will forgive. By the way, Young Texas, you have a most excellent arm!"

"Thanks, Flabby. You in there somewhere, Queen B?"

Beatrice spat dust to bellow, "Down here! Tex! Di! Granny! Sal!"

The Gray Harlequin’s velvet-shod foot pressed hard upon her skull. Her mouth filled. The dust of the Big Bah-Ha tasted like ash.

"Had I known, my friend," said the Gray Harlequin, "that you intended to visit, I would have prepared a welcoming party. Ceremonies, parades, cannonades …" His rancor ground Beatrice beneath his heel.

Snorting, the Flabberghast noted, "Nothing in this blasted heath remembers how to throw a party, Harlequin, least of all you. You brought the Big Bah-Ha to the brink of ruin. Cannons could only improve the place."

The Gray Harlequin grinned most redly. "Perhaps. But who is left to care? Only the dead come here, and those are all mere children. They don’t know any better. They barely know their own names. The wretched brats needed a keeper. Who better to wear the August Crown than myself?"

The Flabberghast rocked in his yellow shoes. "Let us set aside for the nonce a debate regarding the befitting resettlement of souls, the governance of the deadlands, and the corruption of the August Crown. Let us instead, dear Harlequin, turn to the more important question of aesthetics. The plain truth is, Harlequin, you have made the Big Bah-Ha far too ugly. And I cannot abide ugliness."

"You live in a cardboard box," sighed the Gray Harlequin. The tension in his toes did not ease. Beatrice thought that if he pressed any harder, her skull would explode.

"It only looks like a cardboard box," the Flabberghast retorted. "Anyone who enters knows it for a palace. But this place?" He shook his head. "Last I visited the Big Bah-Ha, the skies were endless and sapphirine. Where now only thin grooves mark the dust, there once flowed seven mighty rivers. Manticores, glatisants, silver-bearded unicorns abounded, offering songs, riddles, rides to the young newcomers, who looked upon them with awe and wonder. Green was the grass, sweet were the flowers, and everything smelled of something even better blooming in the distance. Such wild, clear music rang from dryad lips and satyr horns. Such dancing gadabouts were held, such glad feasts. Chuckle City, your degraded city, was a city of silken tents, not tenements, each flowing canopy woven of silver silk spun anew every morning by the Eleven Lovely Emilies. And how lovely they were, the Keepers of the Hourglass, the Guardians of the Gate. How lovely they were, but see what they have become!"

The ring of Gacy Boys hooted and cooed uneasily. Perhaps they remembered such a time, remembered too how they had forgotten it. But the Gray Harlequin only sneered.

"They are all still here, Flabberghast — the monsters of whom you so fondly reminisce. Glatisants, manticores, centaurs, tra-la, tra-la, et cetera, they are all to be found in my petting zoos. As for your Eleven Emilies — it is a stretch, is it not, to call them lovely? — they work for me now. In exchange for food. I do not think there is a prettier sight than an Emily feeding on what falls from the wires to her web."

"What is the food?" asked the Flabberghast. Beatrice thought she heard a thread of nervousness and longing running through his words. "This is the Big Bah-Ha. It is the last and lowest of the deadlands. There is nothing to eat here but the souls of those who died too young."

"Exactly so," hissed the Gray Harlequin. "Can’t you smell them, Flabberghast? So sweet, so rare, so plump with potential. So much finer than the coarse stuff of carbon."

"Souls!" That one word was almost a wail. Beatrice squirmed beneath the Gray Harlequin’s crushing shoe. "What need have you of souls, when all the bones of a dead world are ours for the digging?"

The Gray Harlequin’s laughter was like a cougar sharpening its claws on a hollow tree. "Digging in the dirt like worms, like maggots, like old blind moles under Hillside Cemetery, where we voluntarily entered a debasing confinement until the last human falls. The whole world is not ours for the eating, not for years yet, my Flabberghast, not unless you’ve sped along the deaths of all those little ones running wild in their packs. Have you, Flabberghast? You alone among us had the freedom to do so. You alone of the Tall Ones were allowed passage beyond the gates. Our great ambassador to those little human meat lumps. You, who were once our jester! Our fool!"

"No one objected at the time." The Flabberghast had smoothed his voice again. If the Gray Harlequin was syrup, the Flabberghast was a rich, tasty grease of butter, and Beatrice, squashed flat between their voices, was beginning to feel like the pancake.

Then she heard Tex shout, "Hey, Flabby, is that snotbum another of all y’all Tall Ones? Thought you said only kids were allowed in here."

Diodiance asked, "How’d he even get in?"

At Granny’s behest, Sheepdog Sal barked, and at the sound, the others of the Barka gang hushed, remembering how they’d gotten in. They fingered the half-healed holes in their wrists. Somehow they couldn’t see the Gray Harlequin asking a living child politely for his blood. He’d just take it and paint his red doorway on any old skin. He wouldn’t even have bothered bringing a living child in with him, for he’d never planned on coming back out. The Flabberghast spoke into their awful silence.

"Our prison term, if that is what you wish to call it, Harlequin, is only a matter of a few short years. The slaprash lingers. When the last human remnant comes of age …"

Here he stopped, but Beatrice knew how the sentence would end. They all did, back home.

"Breath starts to rattle

Like dice in a cup

And the slaprash’ll getcha

When — you’re — all — growed — up!"

Even for the youngest among them, even for Granny Two-Shoes, it was only a matter of time. Till they grew up and died dead, slapped red. Beatrice closed her eyes against the pain of it, the futility, the hopelessness of such a future. What was the point?

And, as if summoned, Granny’s face appeared between one of the Gacy Boys’ sticklike legs. She waved at Beatrice and smiled. Her one gray tooth was like a keyhole amid the bright glare of the whiter ones.

"Hey, Granny!"

Granny Two-Shoes slid something across the ashy ground. Beatrice crept one arm out from her side, slowly, so slowly, hoping she could snatch the slingshot without the Gray Harlequin noticing. But he was entirely caught up in his indignation, she saw. Just like Aunt Oolalune back in the land of the living. So marvelously self-absorbed and easy to distract.

That’s what the Flabberghast is, Beatrice realized. A distraction. One I’m meant to use.

Still the Gray Harlequin argued. "A few years, you say? A decade, perhaps, if we’re lucky. A decade of gnawing flavorless femurs and sucking stale marrow in some moldy old Midwestern cemetery." He laughed bitterly. "Do you think I — I, who witnessed the Black Death and the birth of Pantalone—wish to spend my hard-won perpetuity scrabbling for sustenance and listening to your infernal jokes, Flabberghast, all day and all night, until the stars burn out, when here, here in this place where there are no stars, I can be God and King together, presiding over an eternal feast?"

He reached a long arm to stroke the feral head of a Gacy Boy. "Here, among my little friends?" he asked, more softly. "Who require my guidance, welcome my tutelage? I gave them wings to fly. They deliver my messages. They capture monsters for my entertainment. They hunt the deadlands for the souls that are my meat and drink. They are very useful, and so very grateful to be of use. To have a little power, where before they had none."

The Flabberghast hesitated before replying, but Beatrice watched the rocking of his yellow shoes come to a standstill.

Be ready, she thought. Be wary. Be watchful. Take your best chance.

"You guide them nowhere but over their own dusty traces time and again. You offer them a little glamour, and they mistake it for power. You have turned the children’s only door, their rightful door, into a distorted mirror where they must see themselves marked with murder, disease, accident, neglect, lack, with no hope of anything better. You lock them in perpetual despair until their souls wither, and then you devour their souls. No God or King, you, Harlequin. Jailer. Tormenter. Executioner."

The air filled with whistles and whispers as the Gacy Boys turned to the Gray Harlequin.

"You said it was a magic mirror."

"You said there was no way out."

"You said we must look at ourselves."

"At our own dead faces."

"Into our own dead eyes."

"Acknowledge what was done to us."

"And laugh."

"You said," keened the smallest Gacy Boy, whose cap and bells sat a bit awry, "if I could laugh, I would see my mother. But I couldn’t look — I couldn’t look at that again! I’ve done everything you said …" He bent his head and sobbed. His ivory eyes spurted tears like crude oil.

The others broke formation to comfort him, handcuffs dangling, chains clinking. They drifted off together in desolate clumps, leaving the Gray Harlequin exposed. He turned in sudden fury to the Flabberghast, his foot slipping from Beatrice’s skull.

"You’ve upset them!"

The Flabberghast shrugged.

"Tell me," said the Gray Harlequin, "you who’ve traveled all this way. Did you even wait until she died to peel off her skin and nail it to your wall?"

Beatrice breathed without breath. She remembered the flensing tool. How the Flabberghast had started with her foot. Her left foot. Just as the last blood oozed from her pores and the last of her convulsions ceased.

Enough.

She gripped the slingshot Granny Two-Shoes had slid her. Swiped from the dirt the bullet casing that had spared her the red nose. Wriggled onto her back. Slid out of range of that crushing foot. And took her shot.

BING!

She couldn’t throw like Tex, but she was still the best shot in Hillside.

Knocked askew by the flying missile, the August Crown went hurtling from the Gray Harlequin’s head. It spun, it glistened, the wings that grew from it seemed to flap and fly. Bald as a vulture, the Gray Harlequin dove for it, but the Flabberghast caught him by the folds of his saffron robe and ripped him away from his goal.

In thew and sinew, the Gray Harlequin was stronger than the Flabberghast, who, though taller, was thinner, too, almost frail. Perhaps old bones were not as nourishing as young souls. When the Gray Harlequin fisted the lapels of the Flabberghast’s red brocade vest, he lifted him out of his shoes. His ruby mouth yawned open. Black gums studded with diamond fangs shone with saliva. A black tongue flicked out, split like a snake’s.

"How passing sweet will a living Tall One taste, after all these years of eating death? Do you remember the old days, Flabberghast, when we had only each other to devour under the hills? How thin we grew then. But we always had enough, you and I."

The Flabberghast said a word that Beatrice did not know. She thought it was not a human word.

In answer, the Gray Harlequin slammed him into the mirror. Not once, not twice, not thrice, but over and over again, and each time the Flabberghast’s body against the glass made a sound like lightning striking cathedral bells.

Beatrice turned to the other members of her Barka Gang, who watched the scene with wide, frightened eyes. Could the Flabberghast fall? Fail? Would he be ate up, and they in their turn? Beatrice snapped her fingers. Their focus shifted. Their faces cleared.

"We got this, Barkas," she whispered with a cheerful grin. "Won’t cost us more sweat than can make a salt lick. Remember the Battle of the Baseball Diamond? How we brung Big Johnny low?"

"Like yesterday, Queen B!" Diodiance said happily.

"Go on, then!"

Diodiance and Tex dashed forward to grasp hands. Granny Two-Shoes slung herself from Sal’s back into the stirrup they made of their fingers. They heaved her into the air, and she flew like a Gacy Boy, high and higher, until she landed on the Gray Harlequin’s saffron-swathed shoulders. Her switchblade was ready. A snick. A plunge. A sideswipe. Black blood gushed from his throat in geysers, spraying the Flabberghast and the silver mirror behind him.

As it had before, upon Beatrice’s flayed skin, the black bloodstain with its tiny white lights began to spread in all directions. There came a mighty crack. And the Flabberghast, against a rain of stained shards, laughed as the Gray Harlequin crumpled to the ground. Before he hit, Granny Two-Shoes jumped clear of him. Beatrice embraced the little girl out of the air, and spun her three times, and cradled her close like she used to do every night, when she and Granny were the only Barkas left awake.

"You’re the world’s last wonder, Granny Two-Shoes!" Beatrice murmured into her ear. "I wish you’d live forever."

Granny Two-Shoes buried her head in Beatrice’s shoulder and let her switchblade fall.

Diodiance and Tex, still holding hands, leapt about, whooping the Barka victory song. The Flabberghast shook the last of the glass splinters from the cuffs of his sleeves. He crouched over the bald corpse of the Gray Harlequin and said in a low voice, "You were a bad clown. You couldn’t make a jackal laugh."

With that, he stripped the black velvet ribbon from the Gray Harlequin’s face, dug one long finger deep into the single central socket there, lifted out a round white thing like a great, blind eyeball, and popped it into his mouth. A shudder shook him, as though the pleasure of it were more than he could bear.

§

Twelve of the Gacy Boys left the Big Bah-Ha forever that day. The smallest went first, the golden wind from the newly opened Elephant Gate burning away the chains and gaffer’s tape, the cap and bells, the hangman’s hood, until he was simply dressed in playclothes, his face clean and calm and unafraid. He cried out, "Oh! I see her! I see her!" and ran ahead of the rest, laughing.

The other boys looked past the gate with longing, but some dread gripped them still. They turned their backs on the great elephants, and trudged away into the low hills of the Big Bah-Ha.

"Don’t they want outta here?" asked Diodiance.

"Not ready yet," said Beatrice. "Maybe they still see a mirror. Or think they don’t deserve to laugh. I dunno. But give ‘em time. They got all the time in forever."

When one way or another the Gacy Boys were gone, a few children crept down the hill from Chuckle City. Rosie Rightly led three rustics, four grotesques, and a tramp riding an old white tiger from the Big Top. Pacing them, a contingent of eleven beautiful women, whose four arms and four legs apiece were clear like crystal and flute-thin. Their red hair blew around them like the flames of Chuckle City. The red hourglasses of their eyes shone.

"Those’re the Emilies," Beatrice explained to the Barka Gang. "They guard the Elephant Gate."

Granny Two-Shoes, still hanging tightly onto Beatrice’s neck, strained to see. Beatrice swung her onto her shoulders for a better view. Rosie Rightly came bounding up to them.

"Hi, Bee-Bee! Bee-Bee! Hi! Hello! Is it true? The Gray Harlequin is dead?"

"Done to death by Granny here." Beatrice patted Granny Two-Shoes’s knee. Rosie Rightly took one of Granny’s pink Mary Janes and kissed the toe of it.

"Thank you, girlington!" she breathed. "Oh, thanks ever so. He made me bring him here, you see. Back at the end of days. No one came home that night. The other houses in my neighborhood were all on fire, and the Tall Ones marched through town toward Hillside Cemetery, wearing white lights on their shoulders. My house was dark, and I was hiding, but the Gray Harlequin knocked on my front door anyway. He saw me through the screen and came right in. He tore my wrists on his teeth and painted me with my own blood. Then he bit his mouth and bled on me from the wound, and walked right through my skin to the deadlands, taking my soul along with him."

She showed her glowing wounds. Before Beatrice could say anything — and what could she say but "I’m sorry?" Too paltry and lacking by half — a wind from the Elephant Gate rushed upon them, bathing Rosie Rightly in light, turning her wounds to gold.

"Oh!" Rosie Rightly clapped delighted hands to her mouth and bounced. "Look! Look! Look! Big brother, and little brother, and baby brother, too! And Papa, and Mama, and puppy, and kitty, and Grandma, and Cousin Albert, and …" Her laughter pealed out. She bounced right past the huge stone elephants and into somewhere else.

There, too, went the rustics, the grotesques, the tramp, and the tiger. But the Eleven Lovely Emilies stayed. They settled near the gate and set to spinning. Something silver and flowing. Something fine, of silk.

Beatrice looked toward Chuckle City, frowning. "There should be more. There were hundreds of clowns — kids — back there."

"It never happens all at once," the Flabberghast told her. All this time, he had been sitting on the ground quietly chewing bits of the Gray Harlequin until the corpse was riddled. For the first time since dying, Beatrice was glad she didn’t have a stomach.

"Oh," he exclaimed. "Look at this! I had all but forgotten!"

Bending at the waist, he reached out and swiped a glinting object from the gray dust. It was the August Crown. In his hands it twinkled and fluttered, shimmered and rang as if asking him a question.

The Flabberghast laughed in answer and told the chiming crown, "Me? Oh, no. You are quite mistaken if you think that." He shook his curly orange head and popped another of the Gray Harlequin’s fingers into his mouth. He glanced up at Beatrice with his strange black eyes, but aimed his chatter at the crown.

"Despite present evidence to the contrary," he said around his mouthful, "I really do prefer bones. I like my cardboard hut out front of the gravy yard. I even find it enjoyable to keep up with the kiddy gangs, and learn their rhymes, and bear witness to their final wars. And, no offense" — Beatrice wondered who he thought would take offense; the August Crown wasn’t the world’s liveliest conversationalist — "I just hate babysitting. Really, this entire venture stretched even my illustrious ambassadorial tolerance to its absolute limit, and this with the Barka Gang being doubtless the least vexing specimens of their species. I chalk that up to the benefits of strong leadership, you know. Nothing like discipline, and cleverness, and kindness in a leader to create harmonious cohesion in the underlings."

He eyed Beatrice. He twirled the August Crown in his long white hands.

Startled, she took a step backward. "I don’t think …"

But the Flabberghast spun up from the ground like a motley tornado, a bone sticking out of his mouth like a cigarette, his long, oddly jointed hands extended, and plopped the August Crown upon her head. Granny Two-Shoes patted it and laughed. The sound was rare and small. Barely a breath.

"There!" cried the Flabberghast. "Three cheers for Beatrice, Queen of the Big Bah-Ha!"

No one cheered, but Diodiance did stretch to her tiptoes to ding one of the August Crown’s bells.

"Ha! Look atcha, Queen B! Ain’t you just like one of those ladygods your Dad used to whopper on about? Not Durga. One of the others. Those deadland queens. Remember all those stories you told us, B? ‘Bout Hel and Ereshkigoogle and Pursopoly?"

"Persephone," Beatrice murmured. Then, with longing, "Dad."

She could feel him right behind her, so near, just beyond the stone elephants and the warm golden splash of light. She wanted to go to him, go right now, tell him how she’d lived, how she’d died, everything that had happened since, ask him what came next, and if they’d ever have to part ways again.

Beatrice sighed, and turned away from the Elephant Gate. "All right. I’ll wear your August Crown."

The Flabberghast’s voice was gentle. "It is not mine, Beatrice. It is yours — very simply, because it needs you. And it is only for a little while, after all."

"I know." Beatrice laughed a little. "Ten years, right? Give or take."

Granny Two-Shoes climbed down from her shoulders and into her arms again, and Beatrice clasped her close and looked over at Tex and Diodiance. "What do you think, Barkas dear? Figure I can sort out this here Big Bah-Ha in ten years or so?"

Tex blew a raspberry. "B, you’ll have it spick-and-span by the time I get slapped up. That’s what? Four years? Three if my growth spurt comes young. Whaddya think, Di?"

Diodiance shrugged. "Two years tops, she’s whupped this place to shape. After that, you ‘n’ me, Tex, we’ll get here in no time flat. But I’m thinking, Queen B, we’d best not pass the Elephant Gate ourselves till Granny Two-Shoes joins us. No fair tryin’ to make us laugh for joy before then. We all go in together or not at all."

"I will wait," Beatrice promised. "We will all wait."

The Flabberghast took Granny Two-Shoes’ hand in his and squinted to inspect her wrist. "Hark, friends. Our time draws to an end. Your scabs are almost completely formed."

Granny Two-Shoes tugged her hand free and pressed it to her heart. Yes, she noticed. It was squeezing. Had been feeling strained for some time. Her ears made a noise like being born.

She remembered. Granny Two-Shoes remembered everything.

Beatrice helped her up onto Sheepdog Sal’s back and tousled her tangled hair. "See you later, kiddo. In every pinch, just ask yourself, ‘what would Durga do?’ Keep that knife sharp. Serve those Rubberbabies ding-danged tarnation in a soup tureen whenever you can."

Granny Two-Shoes nodded. Looked down. Blinked and blinked at Sal’s flopsy ears so as not to cry. It was not yet night. She only cried at night.

Beatrice tossed her slingshot to Tex. "Yours, my man."

"Thanks, Beatrice," he mumbled. His tears fell into the gray dust, hot and living. The water welled up, sparkled, began to form a stream.

The first of seven rivers, Beatrice thought.

She unwound a blue ribbon from her hair and dropped it into Diodiance’s outstretched palm. Diodiance wrapped it twice around her arm and tied it off with her teeth. Her lips trembled.

Drip. Drip. Splash.

Another river.

"Quickly now, children," said the Flabberghast. "Not through the arch, but through the elephant’s legs. The left elephant, mind. The one on the right takes you to a far different place." He winked a long black eye and lifted his slender wrist. "Ah, speaking of which, before you go … Might you spare me those last precious dewdrops of your wet blood? That I may myself get back through, you understand. The doors to the deadlands are tricky and likely to lock behind one."

Tex hesitated, but Diodiance whacked him on the arm. Granny Two-Shoes acquiesced before either of them, anointing him with the sticky remnant of her wound. Tex and Diodiance followed suit, then slung their arms around each other and disappeared between the stone legs. Sheepdog Sal licked Beatrice’s hand and bounded away with Granny Two-Shoes clinging tightly to her fur. Lastly, the Flabberghast shouldered what was left of the Gray Harlequin like a sack of presents. He turned his stagger into a bow for Beatrice.

"I apologize," he said, "for flensing your skin before you were quite dead all the way through, then stretching it upon my wall. But I needed a doorway. And your skin was so very, very clear."

Bent low like that, he came face-to-face with her. In the blackness of his eyes, stars.

Beatrice asked softly, "We’ll never know, will we? Whatever it is you are."

"I," he answered, laughing, "am the Flabberghast!"

Then off he danced with that weight on his back, awkward as tumbleweed. Only Beatrice noticed he did not leave through the left set of stone legs. He’d taken the ones on the right. Went elsewhere. Where the Tall Ones go.

Resolutely, Beatrice turned her back again on the Elephant Gate. A golden wind warmed her neck. A rent in the gray sky showed a gleam of blue.

Eleven Lovely Emilies smiled down at her.

This novelette originally published by Drollerie Press in October 2011

C. S. E. Cooney (csecooney.com/@csecooney) is the author of Bone Swans: Stories (Mythic Delirium 2015). The Nebula Award-nominated title story will be appearing in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novellas 2016. She is the author of the Dark Breakers series, Jack o’ the Hills, The Witch in the Almond Tree, and a poetry collection called How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features her Rhysling Award-winning poem "The Sea King’s Second Bride." Her short fiction and poetry can be found at Uncanny Magazine, Lakeside Circus, Black Gate, Papaveria Press, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, GigaNotoSaurus, Goblin Fruit, Clockwork Phoenix 3 & 5, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies, and elsewhere.

Interview with Cover Artist Sunny Ray

Russell Dickerson

This month's Apex Magazine cover artist is Sunny Ray, a multifaceted artist working in digital painting and illustration. Many of her pieces are driven by the stories that she loves to write, leading to new paintings and animations. "The Fire," this month's Apex cover art, is part of a concept for a story about a boy who can use the sky like a touchscreen.

The Fire

APEX MAGAZINE: On the DeviantArt page for "The Fire," the first comment makes a great point about people staring at their devices these days, adding "we should be looking up, not down." With films like Interstellar offering similar advice, do you hope that someone seeing this piece will be inspired to try something bold? How do you see your work helping others to take a bigger step into new things?

SUNNY RAY: I would like to think it would inspire people to try something bold! I think people may interpret it differently than I do, however, as the basis of the message in my mind as I was painting it is if you are going to go out, you might as well do it with a bang, like a brilliant sunset before the dark. We’re only here for a short time, so we might as well go out bright and loud. Either way people interpret this painting, whether it to be looking down and reach for the stars, or if they interpret it as going out with a bang, I can see this work pushing people to ignore the limits and go the distance!

AM: With being a student of both design and animation, does creating a piece like "Breathing Galaxies" start with the focus on the climactic image, or planning the overall animation and message? How might the message of a piece change over the time the animation takes to run its course, and how does the art style versus the design technique influence that?

SR: To be honest, that piece only really started because I saw a picture of the subject that I really wanted to recreate in an aesthetic style. This was a test of my abilities to not only recreate realism from a photograph but to also add an expectant element of animation in a still imagery. But, usually if I am going to start an animation like that, I have an idea for the image I want to create, then I will play around and try different things with the animation. The message might change depending on the animation or the animation furthers the message. This piece you only see the message because of the animation.

AM: In the descriptions of a few of your DeviantArt pieces, you mention having a rough week. That's something many artists and creators, even in my own personal experience, work through seemingly more than the general public. Does creating new art help you work through any life issues? Are the colors you choose or the style you are creating with affected by your emotions as you work?

Monterey Dreams

SR: Yes, definitely, making art has helped me through my struggle against life. Of course the only reason I have the experience and the passion for art was because of my weakest moments. It’s one of my biggest comforts that if everything were to go south, I’d know I’d at least have my art and stories there in the end. For me, however, I don’t think my style or the colors I choose are really affected by my emotions as much as the concept of the piece. I have color schemes that I’m partial too, like, I prefer a warmer palette over cool colors.

AM: As a student, you have to often follow particular assignments and plans. When you work on personal pieces that don't have that structure, do you approach the ideas any differently? Do you prefer the openness of your own choices, the rigidness of a structured assignment, or a bit of both?

SR: I jump right into personal projects. It could be three in the morning and if an idea hits me that I like then I will start then and there and work through the night on it. Unfortunately, I do not have quite the same vigor when it comes to my assignments usually because I don’t have the openness of the choice. In one of my classes, we were assigned to create a twenty-page magazine featuring articles, ads, and visuals in a group. However, my whole group neglected to show up for class so my teacher let me do the magazine on my own per request. While all the other groups struggled with the rigidity of having to agree on a topic and self-create all the content within the time frame, I flew through that assignment faster than any other assignment because while there were requirements I had to fulfill, I got to make all the choices while the other groups had to adhere to their group decisions.

AM: On the DeviantArt page for your beautiful piece "Fallen Angel," you mention your improvement in painting wings. When you look at your own works, do you look at them more from the aspect of the vision and content, or the techniques that you used to create them? Are there interpretations or critiques of your pieces from others that you wouldn't have expected?

Fallen Angel

SR: When I look at my work, I think I see both. Sometimes I look back on them to see where the vision and contents came from while other times I will look back to see my technique and how I can improve in future works. I think to use old works as references for future pieces. My friends and followers have told me that my art inspires them, which is something I never had expected my art to be able to do. Other than that however, I haven’t gotten any interpretations or critiques that I wouldn’t have expected, or none that come to mind.

Sunny Ray is studying web design and animation, and plans to continue painting and personal art projects. She also has several stories and books planned for the future, including more about the boy from this month's cover. To see more of her work, visit intothefrisson.deviantart.com and facebook.com/IntotheFrisson.

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.

Interview with Andrew Fazekas — Author of Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe: The True Science Behind the Starship Voyages

Michael A. Burstein

Fifty years ago, when Star Trek first debuted on television, it differed from a lot of other media science fiction in one important way. Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator and executive producer, wanted it to be as intelligent as possible. As much as he could, he wanted the show to reflect science as realistically as possible.

As a result, whereas other science fiction shows might have made up names for stars and planets, or had spaceships travel from one star to another without worrying about their actual locations, Star Trek strove to be correct. Throughout its travels, the Enterprise and other vessels would encounter stars, planets, asteroid, comets, and nebulae that were scientifically accurate and in some cases really existed.

Andrew Fazekas, the science writer, broadcaster, and lecturer also known as the Night Sky Guy (see http://www.thenightskyguy.com), has just published a book that aims to connect the Star Trek fan with the real universe. Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe: The True Science Behind the Starship Voyages is a colorful hardcover delight published in June by National Geographic and retailing for $24.95. The book includes a foreword by his fellow Canadian William Shatner, whom you may have heard of, as he won two Emmy Awards for playing the character Denny Crane. And, oh yes, he originated the role of Captain James T. Kirk.

Image courtesy of CBS

Throughout the book, Fazekas presents events from Star Trek episodes, explains the science behind them, and provides guides to finding astronomical phenomena in the night sky. For example, in a section on alien life, Fazekas introduces the concept by citing the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles," next discusses the necessary conditions for alien life to develop on a planet, and then finally guides the reader to find the star Tau Ceti in the sky, as it might have habitable planets orbiting it.

Andrew Fazekas was nice enough to take the time to answer our questions about this cool book and Star Trek.

APEX MAGAZINE: How did you get interested in Star Trek?

ANDREW FAZEKAS: With Star Trek it really is something that goes back to my childhood. Some of my earliest recollections were watching the reruns of the original series in the 1970s. I was born and grew up in Montreal, Canada, so I got to see that series with my dad. Sunday mornings we would watch Star Trek together and all those cosmic adventures that they would go through.

AM: How did you get interested in astronomy?

AF: My father is a research scientist and medical doctor. I grew up with him introducing me to all the different types of science, being outdoors, stargazing, fishing, and camping. I was always able to ask him questions. He saw that when I was five and six years old, I was asking him questions about spaceships going on intrepid voyages to weird destinations. So he went out and got a telescope. It allowed us to take our own voyages across the night sky, we would go up to the rooftop of this fourteen-story building and set up the telescope and he would put me on his lap.

AM: So your interest in Star Trek is directly connected to your interest in astronomy?

AF: Yes! The idea of watching Star Trek and watching the stars through a telescope really went hand in hand. Some of my earliest memories are sitting on my dad’s lap and seeing the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the craters on the moon.

Image courtesy of CBS

Page 190-191

To view a full sized version visit http://bit.ly/28VTJU5.

AM: Can you tell us more about this connection between Star Trek and astronomy?

AF: It’s just a natural connection between these two different worlds. Star Trek particularly has this amazing ability to speak to this deep-seated feeling people have of wanting to explore the unknown. Star Trek speaks to anyone who is a space nerd or a science nerd. It takes science very seriously. They have science consultants on their team when they developed all the series throughout the decades.

For a person like me who is a scientist and science educator it speaks to me. Science fiction in general is an expansion of reality. We have the real world around us but we yearn to explore the unknown. Humans are an amazing species in that we have the ability to use our imagination to take reality to the next level. Star Trek brings that excitement to people.

AM: How did you come up with the idea of writing a guide to the universe by using Star Trek?

AF: Over the years I’ve been a Star Trek fan but I’ve also been an astronomy educator and communicator. Going back many decades I’ve been doing educational workshops and stargazing parties for all age groups. I take my telescopes out under the stars and show people different things happening under the sky, including meteor showers and eclipses. I’ve always tried to make connections to people that they could relate to, as astronomy can be very daunting to some people. I wanted to bring astronomy down to Earth and show how amazing he cosmos is without needing to dumb down or use science jargon.

I had already been a writer and I was looking for an idea for a book project to do. One of the ideas was to do a guide book but there were already so many astronomy guide books out there. How could I do something different? I realized that I could showcase objects that I had seen in Star Trek, be they a supernova remnant, a double-star system, or something else. I could show them the counterpart to that fictional object, and they would remember seeing it from an episode.

Image courtesy of CBS

Pages 94-95

To view a full sized version visit http://bit.ly/28Sb7nz.

AM: Does Star Trek showcase a lot of real astronomical objects? How real is the Star Trek universe compared to our universe?

AF: There are tons of real life objects. Either the actual objects in the episodes really exist, or there are real-life counterparts that are part of the universe.

AM: So how did you get from conceiving of the book to actually writing and publishing it?

AF: I thought of this idea and wrote out a synopsis ten years ago. I was a full-time freelance science writer, a starving writer, and I was trying to get these book ideas out there. I write mostly new stories for online and print outlets. Writing a book proposal is a big affair that takes a long time. You have to make your case for your book, but I had only a synopsis. The plan was to write a full proposal and then pitch it to different publishers.

However, life happens. We had our first child and fourteen months later we had our second child. As I was working from home, I couldn’t fathom the idea of pitching my idea and writing a full-blown proposal. I couldn’t afford the time to dedicate to this kind of writing. I said I would tuck it away and when my children got older and I don’t have babies running around my house I could spend the time on this it needs.

But at the same time I became a regular columnist with National Geographic News, writing the Starstruck column online, which has earned a lot of success. Out of the blue, I get a call from the book division asking if I’d be interested in writing a book for them. After fifteen minutes of talking about making my column into a book I said I do have this other idea and I pitched it. Within fifteen minutes the editor was taken with the project.

What we realized very quickly was that in a couple of years it would be the 50th anniversary of this franchise and Paramount would be coming out with a new movie. This was an opportunity like no other. I gave them the synopsis that I had written in my backyard in Montreal from ten years ago.

Paramount loved the project from the beginning and CBS was very enthusiastic. This was the type of the project they had been thinking about for decades. We’re showcasing science in their franchise in such a positive light. The folks at Star Trek opened up the vaults of their archives to our team. We would ask for a screenshot of a certain object and they would try to find a unique representation that hadn’t been seen before in print. It was cool to have that. The access we had was amazing.

AM: What do you hope to accomplish with this book?

AF: I want to get people excited to go out under the stars. My hope is that the fans of Star Trek will pick up the book, find out about the real objects, and go outside to try to find those objects. I’m hoping the book will introduce stargazing as a hobby to where the parents and children can go outside together.

AM: Do you think this book might appeal to people interested in astronomy who are not also Star Trek fans?

AF: I can tell you that there’s a natural fit between these two groups of people. I belong to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. I’ve been a member since the age of twelve. There’s never a time when there’s no reference to science fiction or Star Trek. It speaks to anyone who is science-oriented.

AM: Although the Star Trek and real universe information on each topic is presented separately, do you worry that some readers might not be able to distinguish between the fiction and the science?

AF: I’m not really concerned because we made clear the distinction between the two. What’s exciting is how real the Star Trek universe is. Some of the technology used in Star Trek is coming into reality now. Our sidebar "Are we there yet?" looks at beloved technologies from Star Trek and shows how far we’ve gotten with them today.

AM: The book uses photos and references to the original universe and the new movies. Do you have any preference for either version with respect to real science being included?

AF: There is hardcore science involved in all versions, even in the reboot movies. In Star Trek Into Darkness, the Enterprise hides in the upper atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. The folks on the film consulted with Carolyn Porco, the main imager of the Cassini mission to Saturn, for the scene. They rendered the hazy atmosphere and showed how the ship would rise out of the atmosphere. And then you can see Saturn’s rings. And I can take you out to see Saturn in the night sky and you can see those rings for yourself! That always knocks people’s socks off. People think you need a giant observatory but all you need is a telescope. You can actually step outside to your backyard and see them for yourself. That is so cool.

Fans have asked me about the animated series. Even the animated series was true to form. They included a double-star system, Beta Lyra.

AM: What’s your favorite Star Trek series?

AF: I’m very nostalgic, and I have to go back to the original series. There are many science goofs they made because they simply didn’t know as much as we know now. But I love that first series. The original cast and the chemistry they had just draws me in all the time. If a Star Trek episode is on a channel somewhere I cannot help but watch even if I’ve seen it a billion times.

AM: What’s your favorite episode of The Original Series?

AF: I’ve liked "Spectre of the Gun" since I was a child. I love that the main characters are bound together in a traditional western.

I loved "The Trouble with Tribbles." That’s been a family favorite. My two girls love that episode.

And "The City on the Edge of Forever." There’s science when Kirk looks up at the stars and shows Edith Keeler one of the stars in the belt of Orion. I could go out and see those same stars. As a kid, when I was into stargazing, I made a connection personally with that episode. It must have stayed with me all those decades. He referenced the real star in Orion’s belt.

AM: Was Shatner happy to help out a fellow Canadian by writing the foreword?

AF: When we agreed to do this project, I said I would love for William Shatner to write the foreword. He is so iconic and his character is Star Trek to me. I pleaded with my publishers. I told them to mention to him that I’m a fellow Montrealer and that we went to the same university — McGill University. They opened up the channels to him and he actually wrote the foreword himself. He was tickled pink to help with a science book.

I grew up with this actor playing this amazing role of an explorer, and then to have him in my book — I’m so proud and honored.

AM: Any final thoughts?

AF: To be able to help people appreciate Star Trek on a new level is very humbling. I’m looking forward to sharing my passion for this and to get people to explore the night sky.

Michael A. Burstein, winner of the 1997 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, has earned ten Hugo nominations and four Nebula nominations for his short fiction, collected in I Remember the Future. Burstein lives with his wife Nomi and their twin daughters in the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Town Meeting Member and Library Trustee. When not writing, he edits middle and high school Science textbooks. He has two degrees in Physics and attended the Clarion Workshop. More information on Burstein and his work can be found on his webpage, http://www.mabfan.com.

Earth, Hearing Her Children Cry Out Sharp Like Broken Pottery, Shrinks

Jon Olsen

The upturned astonished faces

grow small below us as we rise

We hold only the protrusions,

half formed déjà vu memories,

the beautiful sleek skinned thought that

we could have done this before—

but always fell

always shattered on something

The great and steady floor behind us

her billions of understandings

agreements she made

with shadow and light,

with turning and falling

she pauses in her worn orbit

to observe us.

She murmurs to our anxious straining backs:

//I wish in a way ten thousand sunrises cannot unwish

and I dream cornucopias of light for you. //

Even now we've barely

knitted our crooked pieces

seen our longing reshaped

thrown one meager bowl

to collect the cataracts of the past—

its brute downpours of memory—

and refuse to break back open.

Fire and smoke,

the stratosphere fades before us

And while gravity loosens

lips and teeth bear down

our tongues close

on the roofs of our mouths

in taut whispers

Hold tight now

and tighter still,

the stars are just ahead.

We don't hear her valediction for the roaring:

//O! Just watch how those silver slivers spin in your wake,

until the clouds break apart and you leave me behind.//

-

A writer, standup comedian, and unheralded systematic theologian from Outer Dakota, Jon Olsen lives and works in Minneapolis with a beautiful family of humans and cats. His poems have previously been seen in Tales of the Unanticipated, Star*Line, and other places.

Canals of Mars

David Jibson

How glorious, the canals of Mars,

as Percival Lowell described them.

How dry the red Martian desert.

How welcome the relief

of water pouring from the polar icecaps

flowing like life’s own blood

through the arteries and veins

over the surface of the warrior planet.

And where they intersect,

a sprawling city of crystal towers,

home to the great university

where once a year in Martian summer

great minds gather to debate the theory

that there could be life on Earth.

Too close to the sun’s deadly heat,

the philosopher-scientists say.

How could it be?

Too wet and the air too heavy to breathe,

argue the philosopher-physicians.

Nothing could live in those conditions.

Even if life could exist there,

argues the philosopher-poet,

how could one write music or poetry

or fall in love under the influence

of a single moon?

David Jibson lives in Ann Arbor, MI, where he is an associate editor of Third Wednesday, a literary and arts magazine. He is a member and events coordinator of the Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle, which supports and promotes poetry readings and workshops.

Apex Magazine Issue 87 Preview

Next month in Apex Magazine, we will have original fiction by A. Merc Rustad ("The Gentleman of Chaos"), E.K. Wagner ("I Remember Your Face"), and Alexis A. Hunter ("Fall to Her"). Our poetry will be by Mary Soon Lee, Frank Tota, Anton Rose, and Peter Venable. We will have a novel excerpt from Erica L. Satifka’s Stay Crazy, and Betsy Phillips explores the phenomenon of INK and The Frame (Double Edge Films) with star Christopher Soren Kelly. Look for this and more in Apex Magazine issue 87 coming in August, 2016.

Copyrights and Acknowledgments

“Words from the Editor-in-Chief” Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sizemore
“Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix” Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Giesbrecht
“Interview with Author Jennifer Giesbrecht” Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Johnson
“Starpower” Copyright © 2016 by Christopher Shultz
“The Big Bah-Ha” Copyright © 2011 by C.S.E. Cooney (originally published by Drollerie Press, 2011)
“Earth, Hearing Her Children Cry Out Sharp Like Broken Pottery, Shrinks” Copyright © 2016 by Jon Olsen
“Canal of Mars” Copyright © 2016 by David Jibson
“La Llorona” Copyright © 2016 by Rodney Gomez
“Knights of the Smooth Hull” Copyright © 2016 by Chris Phillips
“Interview with Cover Artist Sunny Ray” Copyright © 2016 by Russell Dickerson
“Interview with Andrew Fazekas” Copyright © 2016 by Michal A. Burstein
Cover art "The Fire" copyright Sunny Ray

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief—Jason Sizemore
Managing Editor—Lesley Conner
Poetry Editor—Bianca Spriggs

Slush Editors — Andrea Johnson, Anna Middleton, Beth Sutherland, Beverly McPherson, Carolyn Charron, Dawn Griffin, Eileen Maksym, Gabrielle Harbowy, Jessica Nelson, Joshua Cowell, Joshua P’ng, Kate Dollarhyde, Lauren Smith, Lia Swope Mitchell, Lindsay Anderson, Lisa Bolekaja, Mandy Johnson-Parker, Mike Baldwin, Rebecca Hurley, Reese Menezes, Samantha Williams, Stephanie Harris, Andrew Tudor, Anna Chapman, Carl Duzett, Carolyn VanEseltine, Dan Schindel, Heather Cale, and Tacoma Tomilson.

Graphic Designer—Justin Stewart

ISSN: 2157-1406

Apex Publications
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524

Please visit our website at www.apex-magazine.com.

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