Kindle Edition, 2016 © Apex Publications

Contact Apex Magazine

by Apex Editors | 27 words

The Apex editors love to hear from our readers. If you have comments, questions, or issues, don't hesitate to send an email to Jason Sizemore (Publisher/Editor-in-Chief — jason@apex-magazine.com ).

Copyrights and Acknowledgements

by Apex Editors | 238 words

“Words from the Editor-in-Chief” Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sizemore
“Every Winter” Copyright © 2016 by E. Catherine Tobler
“Interview with Author E. Catherine Tobler” Copyright © 2016 Andrea Johnson
“When She Comes” Copyright © 2016 by Samuel Onu-Okpara Chiamaka
“The Island in the Attic” Copyright © 2016 by Natalia Theodoridou
“After We Walked Away” Copyright © 2016 Erica L. Satifka
“Shadow” Copyright © 2010 Tade Thompson (Originally published in Expanded Horizons (2010). Reprinted in The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 2 (Apex Book Company, 2012).
“Rosewater (Novel Excerpt)” Copyright © 2016 Tade Thompson (Published with permission from Apex Book Company, 2016.)
“The Annual Scarecrow Festival” Copyright © 2011 by John Paul Davis (Originally published in Big Pulp , 2011.)
“Love’s Ideal Envisioned by a Satyr” Copyright © 2009 by Tiffany Midge (Originally published in No Tell Motel , 2009.)
“Interview with Cover Artist Ania Tomicka” Copyright © 2016 by Russell Dickerson

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 .

Each new issue of Apex Magazine is released the first Tuesday of the month. Single issues are available for $2.99. Subscriptions are available for twelve months and cost $19.95.

Coming in Issue 91

Next month in Apex Magazine!

by Apex Editors | 17 words

Join us in December when we have original fiction from Lavie Tidhar, Helen Stubbs, and K.T. Bryski!

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by Apex Editors | 91 words

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Interview with Author E. Catherine Tobler

My first circus story, “Vanishing Act,” started as an exercise in voice.

by Andrea Johnson | 1968 words

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already familiar with the works of E. Catherine Tobler. Fans of Apex Publications will know her latest unreal circus novella “The Kraken Sea,” and if you’ve searched out your favorite Apex Magazine authors, you’ve probably enjoyed more of their work at Shimmer , where Tobler is the senior editor. The two magazines publish many of the same authors and artists, and have similar goals — to bring readers excellent fiction that is beautifully crafted, shockingly surreal, and sometimes even shimmery. It’s something that continually brings me joy in the short fiction community: that editors and interviewers and slush readers and everyone else involved with the magazines consider the authors, poets, and artists we work with as a treasure to be shared as much as possible, instead of hoarded.

Apex fans take note, if you enjoyed “The Kraken Sea,” Tobler has plenty more unreal circus stories to entertain you, and when you’re done with those, check out her Folley and Mallory mystery series. And when you’re done with those, you can chase Tobler all across the internet, as she’s been published in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Giganotosaurus, Interzone, Innsmouth Free Press, and in the anthologies Sword and Mythos , Upgraded , The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures , Fractures: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalyse , and Dead North , among many other magazines and anthologies.

What does art in utopia look like? I asked that question on an online forum over 15 years ago (when I was young and thought I knew everything). The conversation I was looking for was that art created in a utopia would be boring, because art is a response to something, and those people wouldn’t have anything to respond to, because they’d be happy with everything. Art is a response to something, something you can’t quite put into words. And if you feel the need to create art, but don’t have something to respond to, don’t have an impetus? I guess you better find one, or your canvas may remain empty.

“Every Winter” isn’t quite fantasy, isn’t quite horror, isn’t quite science fiction, yet it dances a waltz with each of those labels before leaving them behind. Like Halla, you’ll be pulled in many directions, pulled into different rooms of the house, and curious about the rooms your feet won’t take you to. With an artist in the center of the story, the story itself is a sort of performance piece, and as you read it you become part of the artwork, a part of the performance. “Every Winter” is also the perfect story for readers new to Tobler’s work, as it touches on some of her favorite story themes of isolation and how you can be alone and not alone at the same time. This interview contains spoilers for the story, so I recommend reading the story first. Don’t worry, the interview will be waiting for you when you get back.

Tobler was kind enough to let me pick her brain about “Every Winter” and how the story came to be. We also chatted about Shimmer Magazine , the Unreal Circus, and so much more.

Apex Magazine: It’s so easy for someone to come up with reasons for their bruises. I tripped on the stairs, I dropped something heavy and tried to catch it, I’m clumsy. Why does Halla convince herself of more acceptable reasons for her bruises?

E. Catherine Tobler: There is something strange and peculiar happening in the villa, something Not Right, and while I think Halla knows this, she also knows the villa — as much as it may feed off of her — feeds her in return. I see it as a symbiotic relationship — is it mutalism? Both sides are helped, though Halla also experiences some hurt; the villa studies and consumes her, but it also helps her channel her artwork, even though this is artwork that will never see the light of day. I don’t think she excuses it so much as she uses it to create what she is creating — and there’s probably a story in that , what Halla takes back into the world with her when she leaves, how she channels this pain into art. Art often stems from something personal the artist has experienced; something they wish to experience. We are hurt and eventually we put it on the page, on the canvas, in the sculpture.

AM: She’s isolated, and she keeps herself isolated, without even talking to the neighbor lady. In her isolation, she creates an entire world on the walls within the villa, a world no one but her will ever see. Can you tell us more about this theme of isolation, and how it can effect characters (and authors!) during the writing process?

ECT: Halla probably has a unique relationship with people outside her normal social circle. (Does she have a social circle — probably not much of one.) But then the world takes a peculiar view of Halla too — being a woman, being an artist, the neighbor sees Halla as being something Otherworldly. Artists are so strange to these people, but no one else will rent the villa, so they do what they must.

I have friends who can work in coffee shop environments, where people hustle and bustle by; these friends feed off the energy of others. I have friends who go away to work, who rent little houses and live away from the world for a time; these friends feed off the silence. I would definitely be in this latter group, because I don’t create well when someone randomly walks up to me and begins talking about something unrelated to what I’m working on. Sometimes isolation is what a project needs; sometimes it doesn’t need to be shared immediately — if at all.

AM: Halla’s story is told in a rather dreamy and ethereal fashion. Where did the idea for this story and the best way to present it come from?

ECT: The initial idea came after I read a piece about Goya and his Black Paintings. These paintings are a series of 14-15 works that he painted on the very walls of a villa in Spain, Quinta del Sordo . The paintings were later cut from the walls and carried off to museums. The paintings are all darkly themed and as with most art, I wondered what might have happened inside that villa to inspire the works.

For me, every story begins with voice. If I can’t find the voice, finding my way into the story is harder. I could picture this villa very clearly, however, and knew that Halla went every winter. I knew there was a rotting windmill; I could picture the landscapes outside the windows. I started out by telling that bit: “Every winter she takes the villa on the banks of the River X” are my first notes on the project. And then, I rambled on about the road leading somewhere she will never go — but indeed she does go, she simply doesn’t remember going.

AM: Will Halla bring canvas next year? Or is that just something she tells herself? I guess what I’m asking is how does her time in the villa affect the rest of her days? When she’s not at the villa does she miss her time there? As the days get shorter and winter slowly creeps closer does she hope for some excuse not to go, or contemplate going somewhere else for quiet and solitude?

ECT: I don’t believe Halla will bring canvas next year; she tells herself every year she will, and as we see, she does not. I don’t think she misses her time at the villa, no; the story is very cyclical, for everything there is a season, if you will. She knows winter is when she goes to the villa. This is in part because of the entity there; its life is probably also cyclical. It only feeds in the winter, perhaps, like a bear storing energy for hibernation. We join Halla very much in media res — Halla has been to the villa before and will come again and she never remembers her canvas. I am not sure if that cycle will ever be broken.

AM: I would be remiss in my duties as speculative fiction magazine interviewer if we didn’t discuss Shimmer Magazine , where you are the Senior Editor. What’s something about Shimmer Magazine you wish more people knew?

ECT: Not many people know that we are now releasing print anthologies of our stories; one whole year of stories, bundled into a beautiful anthology. Also available digitally, yes, but I know lots of people who missed the print version of Shimmer when we went digital back in 2014. Now, you have the best of both worlds. Read Shimmer online, in your e-reader, and also at the end of every year, in a beautiful trade paperback!

AM: How has working at Shimmer affected your own writing, be it your writing style or your process?

ECT: I started at Shimmer as a slush reader, and reading incoming submissions absolutely shaped the way I approached my craft. I learned what worked in story openings, what good pacing read like, what a satisfying ending felt like. It also taught me that every story isn’t for every market, even if it’s a perfectly good story, so Shimmer showed me how sending the right story to the right market really makes all the difference.

AM: Your most recent Circus stories include The Kraken Sea , “Cloud Dweller,” and “Blow the Moon Out,” but you’ve been writing in this universe since 2004. What can you tell us about this universe, and what stories do you recommend as entry points for readers new to this world?

ECT: My first circus story, “Vanishing Act,” started as an exercise in voice. Voice, voice, voice, I like to play with it. “Vanishing Act” was inspired in part by an old friend, who had a very distinct way of speaking and writing. I wanted to see if I could create a voice like that, unique and unusual, and I think I did. I have always loved carnivals and circuses, and Ray Bradbury is to blame for that.

“Vanishing Act” is a pretty good entry point if readers haven’t explored the series yet. It details a journey by the circus train across Colorado and New Mexico, and the arrival of a strange passenger who may or may not be an alien lifeform. “Lady Marmalade” would also be a good entry, as it shows some of the circus’s inner workings; how the time travel works. Though “Ebb Stung by the Flow,” my newest circus short, might be more of a challenge for new readers, it’s told from the point of view of the train, so that might be a fun escape!

AM: Your fiction runs the gamut from steampunk and alternate history to fantasy to hard scifi to horror. I find that a lot of fiction (short stories especially) is under the surface about asking an unspoken question, or answering an unspoken question. What questions do you enjoy asking in your fiction, and what types of questions do you enjoy answering?

ECT: Much as with Halla, I like exploring isolation and how that affects people; I like exploring the shadows, because we push a lot of things into them. What happens to all those avoided/unanswered feelings, thoughts, words? No matter how we connect with people, we still seem to be entirely isolated universes — can anyone completely know someone else, or is there a point when this is just as good as it gets? I like to explore distances, and how they aren’t always distances at all. How someone who isn’t there can be within you all the same.

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.

Interview with Cover Artist Ania Tomicka

by Russell Dickerson | 884 words

Apex Magazine welcomes Ania Tomicka as our November cover artist, whose wonderful paintings redefine the ideas behind portraiture. With nearly all of her artwork titles being based on songs, Tomicka brings emotional depth to her many beautiful paintings.

APEX MAGAZINE: This month’s Apex Magazine cover is your piece, “No Time,” a provocative and multi-layered piece. When you create a piece that’s open to interpretation, what are you hoping that the viewer will see or be moved by? Do you have a specific vision you want them to see, or are you looking for different viewers to have different interpretations?

ANIA TOMICKA: I am really happy to be featured on your magazine, especially with one of my favorite artworks. When I make a piece I always try to show what is happening in my life in that particular moment, it helps me understand myself better. So I really would like to give my viewers the same feeling, not to understand me, but to have their own interpretation and find something that can relate with their lives.

AM: On your DeviantArt profile, you mention that the American Pop Surrealist movement is one of your inspirations. When you are comparing that with realistic renaissance art that you also mentioned, what are the kinds of things that make the surrealists different or more interesting?

AT: It is the magic, the unknown. With surrealism I can show something that exists only in my mind, or something that inspired me and I want to reinterpret through my vision. There are infinite possibilities, and this is why I love it.

AM: In many of your works, the eyes of your characters become the focal point of the piece. When you paint a character looking directly at the viewer, are you hoping to challenge the viewer directly in some way? Does that character focus cause different reactions than in your works where the character looks somewhere else?

AT: I never thought about challenging the viewer, and at this point I am really curious if that is one of the reactions :) As I said before, I always do my artworks following my mood; sometimes I feel strong enough to have my characters looking directly at the viewer, sometimes I need them to look apart. There was also a moment when I started to paint black faces (I still sometimes do, especially when I don’t understand what is going on with my life).

AM: You seem to move between different materials, say oils and acrylics, often in your galleries. Do you choose the different painting materials based on what you would like to paint? Does a type of material change how you approach the content, either during or before you start painting?

AT: The fact is that I love almost every painting and drawing technique. My absolute favorite is oil colors, that allows me to do a more contemplative and precise artwork. But when I have the urge to create something faster, I use acrylics, watercolors, colored pencils and sometimes other mediums. I love experimenting and finding new ways to express myself.

AM: On DeviantArt, you have a few uploads such as “Azzurrina step by step” ( http://ponyania.deviantart.com/art/Azzurrina-step-by-step-557622477 ) that show the process of the painting. Many artists do that, myself included, as a way not only to promote the work but to ultimately review their own processes. Do your process posts help you learn about your own methods, and do you look at processes from other artists?

AT: I love to watch the process from other artists, it helps me a lot learning new things and how others approach an artwork. I often post my work in progress just to show how I do it, hoping that I can teach something as well. The piece you are talking about was an experiment, I used an alla prima technique and wanted to document all the steps. It is always funny to see your own artwork developing.

AM: Thanks to Ania for answering our interview questions, and giving us insight on her work. Her latest work can be found on her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Ania.Tomicka.Art/ and her Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ponyania/ .

Ania Tomicka was born in 1985 in Lodz, Poland. When she was only nine years old she moved to Italy where she started to draw seriously: manga at first and realistic things afterwards. She attended an art institute and graduated in 2004. During the school years she starts to paint with oil colors, a technique that soon to became her favorite. Hence she attended the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice where she found a lot of inspiration for her realistic and academic art. A year later she moved to Tuscany where she graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. She focused her interest in more things like digital art, illustration and new materials.

She also completed her studies at the academy of digital arts NEMO NT where she gained the title of “student of the year.”

Ania has always been interested in realistic, renaissance works. Her first loves are Salvador Dalì and Wojtek Siudmak’s big canvases, full of absurd and strange creations, painted in a divine way.

Her current paintings are inspired by the American Pop Surrealist movement.

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 .

Love’s Ideal Envisioned by a Satyr

by Tiffany Midge | 242 words

Her legs must be long as rockets, rubbery

as chicken bones soaked in vinegar.

She must be ethereal, hands like talons to stoke the tender coals

he gathers in the woods.

She must arrive on the tail of an exodus, an eviction, or banishment.

She must be Thumbelina-small, fit snug in the cup of a thimble.

She must reject him; this is imperative,

the sharper the wound the more ferocious his longing.

The air she omits must trap his soul like a fly in thick, yellow butter.

Her skin must burn in the sun, her kinfolk

fashioned like dough from the legacies of pillage or rape.

Her heart must cut glass.

She must flourish in the bodies of caves.

She must have wings that touch clouds, and speak the language of crows.

She must disappear like the mist over a mountain at dawn.

She must have no work to keep him, her only occupation

is drawing breath fanned by the circles he runs around her.

She must drink from the ruins of dead boughs.

She must aspire after the hollow in wait of a center.

She must evaporate like sugar kissing the tongue.

For this, he only thinks he’ll surrender.

Originally published in No Tell Motel (October, 2009).

Tiffany Midge is an assistant poetry editor for The Rumpus , and a humor columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network. Her poetry collection “The Woman Who Married a Bear” (University of New Mexico Press) won the Kenyon Review Earthworks Indigenous Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in McSweeney’s , The Rumpus , Waxwing , The Butter , Okey-Pankey , and Moss . She is Hunkpapa Lakota and allergic to horses.

The Annual Scarecrow Festival

by John Paul Davis | 351 words

The Annual Scarecrow Festival

was cancelled this year —

in the fields as you enter the village,

in the strawberries,

there is one left like a sign warning

last chance for a hundred miles.

Unofficially, they made them anyway,

fleshing cast-offs with fistfuls of straw,

stalks poxing the backs of hands, wrists.

Either gouging out their eyes with peeler, scissor,

or scoring their face on sack-cloth, pillow-case.

Back-boned them on garden rakes,

belted their waists round avenue trees.

In detached streets

they appeared in net-curtained windows, waving.

Stood in the post office queue and it did not dwindle.

In The Landlord’s Daughter, pint pots glooming,

no one serving the no one drinking.

In a stalled tractor, in a quiet lane,

one found slumped over the wheel,

thick of its head torn,

protest of orange pulp on the screen.

In class they sat in rows and stared

at yesterday’s blackboard,

oozing through the backs of wooden chairs

made for children. Hay fever came late this year

and Mrs McIver missed her first day —

lying in a sweat in a dream

where their autumn breath filled the room,

sweet and near spoiling,

others crowding the window, looking in.

And in The Wyndham, the amateur dramatics theatre,

the scarecrows took their seats,

rustled their applause

as the stage described the scarecrow players;

the more clamorous hands thinning

from the Circle to the Stalls.

Nothing hit them yet, no smell

of orchards burning, of summer failing,

as tiny flame from the footlights

sniffed out the nearest actors,

the bundles of their ankles,

then fed upward, inside,

in their clothes, moving.

The fire ran

for the grinning rows,

like a whisper through string

between two tin cans.

*

Through dark country fields,

passing one left over

like a mast in a storm,

they entered the village and found

cars and houses stalled,

no one in the pub or school.

In the cemetery, in the rows,

heads in the mud, heads in a hole,

they splintered the first box and saw,

where the body should have been,

only a broken hat, black slumps of clothes.

Straw.

Originally published in Big Pulp (Fall, 2011)

Originally from Liverpool, UK, John Paul Davies now lives in County Meath, Ireland, where he is an active member of Crow Road Writers (Twitter: @crow_rd_writers ). His work has been published in The Fog Horn , Rosebud , The Pedestal , Grasslimb , Pseudopod , Ares Magazine , QU Literary Magazine , and is forthcoming from Grain Magazine . A poem of his is displayed in the finest pub in Liverpool, The Ship & Mitre.

Words from the Editor–in–Chief

Welcome to issue 90 of Apex Magazine!

by Jason Sizemore | 605 words

Let’s talk about Apex Magazine .

Right now we’re in the middle of our annual subscription drive. Our hope is to raise $10000 with this year’s drive. As we did last year, we’ve set up a series of reward levels to thank our readers as we reach milestones on our way to hitting our goal. You can go to Apex-Magazine.com to find the various ways you can subscribe, patron, contribute, and/or donate, and to see all of the amazing bonus content that we’d like to add to the January 2017 issue.

Our goal this year is to raise revenue intake so that we can increase our monthly original fiction word count from 12,000 words to 16,000 words. This will enable us to expand our word count to include novelettes! Our secondary goal is to increase our author pay from 6 cents per word to 8 cents per word.

Did you know we have 1,300 paying subscribers? Our website draws 25,000 to 35,000 unique readers a month. The zine has been up for three Hugos, our stories have been nominated for nearly all the major awards (we’ll get to you someday Sunburst Awards!), and we’ve helped launch and further the careers of many of this generation’s top writers. We’re also one of a small group of “pro-zines” that matriculated out of the category of “semi-pro zine.”

Over the years, we’ve done three issues that specifically featured international SF. In response to #RaceFail a few years ago, Apex published an issue dedicated to Islamic SF that produced a Nebula Award-nominated story by (then) up-and-coming author Amal El-Mohtar. Apex Magazine published “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky that spawned an ongoing cultural discussion that has been painful at times, but necessary. Ursula Vernon’s story “Pocosin” earned a nomination for the inaugural Eugie Foster Award, a nomination that brought me to tears.

Looking ahead, Apex Magazine has no plans of slowing down. In April, I will give over the reins to Maurice Broaddus as he guest-edits issue 94. In August, Dr. Amy H. Sturgis, Tolkien scholar and member of the Cherokee Nation tribe, will guest edit an Indigenous/Native Peoples issue. Diversity has always been important to Apex Magazine , and will always be.

When asked the common question “Why did you start Apex Magazine ?” I can honestly answer “To make a difference.” And I feel that over the 11+ years I’ve been running Apex Magazine (counting the Apex Digest print years) we have made a difference. We’ve also brought a heck of a lot of great short fiction and poetry to our readers during that time!

I won’t mince words. I love what Apex Magazine has become. I love working with Lesley Conner, Bianca Spriggs, Hannah Ruth Krieger, Mahvesh Murad, and our amazing slush team. I love working with our authors and artists. I have a passion for Apex, and I must feed that passion with more Apex.

Help us continue to bring you the strange, beautiful, shocking, and surreal. Check out the subscription drive page at Apex-Magazine.com .

§

This month we have a batch of stories in the magic realism and weird speculative fiction categories by a quartet of amazing women writers: “Every Winter” by E. Catherine Tobler, “When She Comes” by Onu-Okpara Chiamaka, “The Island in the Attic” by Natalia Theodoridou, and “After We Walked Away” by Erica L. Satifka.

Our reprint this month comes courtesy of Tade Thompson. His story “lShadow” is from our anthology The Apex Book World SF: Volume 2 . We also have a two-chapter excerpt from his newest novel Rosewater (Apex Book Company).

Andrea Johnson interviews the great and multi-talented E. Catherine Tobler. Russell Dickerson talks with cover artist Ania Tomicka.

Finally, don’t miss our podcast fiction this month. Mahvesh Murad presents and narrates E. Catherine Tobler’s “Every Winter.”

See you next month!

Jason Sizemore

Editor-in-Chief

Every Winter

Within the villa, there are rooms Halla will not enter, rooms where no light falls.

by E. Catherine Tobler | 5276 words

5,300 Words

Every winter, Halla rents the Villa Couloir on the banks of the Ruisseau de Rieu Ferré for its quiet, its darkness. Near the arch of the old stone bridge, it has a view of little else — skeletal trees, the shadow of a ruined windmill, a long road leading someplace Halla will never go.

Groceries are delivered and left by the back door with a note she will place unread in the bread box; over the course of the winter fifteen notes will collect, all on the same paper, all with the same words ( thank you, if you need anything else , Michel — and Halla can picture his eyes, so wide and dark in their study of her, as if they cannot turn away). Halla comes to the villa because it is a means of getting away from people, from their incessant needs and unquiet wants. Halla would say one cannot create in bustling environments, but has been told time and again women cannot create, unless it is the bloom of life given from a husband’s body. Halla has no husband; believes she will die alone. Not unloved — Halla is confident she was greatly loved, and sometimes thinks back on these figures, but Halla rarely lingers. They only flit through memory, for each has gone as everyone does. Perhaps they went on to marry, have children, but for her they ceased living the moment she parted ways with them. Lahja will always be on the cusp of the priesthood; Valo will always be poised to ascend the stage.

Every winter, the villa enfolds Halla and welcomes her return. She has been told it is a cold space, that winters spent by the river are cruel, but Halla has been told many things she ignores. She has been told by the landlord not to go into the uppermost bedroom, where the fading paper curls from the walls, so it is always the first place she goes. The room is not cold, despite the snow falling beyond the windows, despite the lack of a fire in its clean and ready hearth. The paper was once gold and holds a hint of summer’s sun yet. She can see no great reason to not enter the room.

From the room’s windows, she can see the villa’s garden; poised in the center of the villa’s walls, it appears to have been designed with winter in mind, for only when the trees shed their leaves can one properly see the labyrinthine pattern of plantings. The bare branches and trunks arch in a tangled canopy over the marble fountain trickling with water yet, a layer of ice encasing the naked woman rising from its center. After the villa’s original owner died, they wrapped the stone in black burlap for a year — Halla can imagine what it was like when her face was at last bared, when full sun fell again on shoulders and breasts.

Halla takes the smallest room as her own — not the uppermost room with its peeling paper, but a room on the north side of the house, where the shadows linger. She does not like the morning sun waking her, no matter that she otherwise appreciates its warmth and light. She will wonder in the coming days at the warmth that creeps from the foot of the bed, infusing her bare feet, her slim thighs. Halla will wonder over the way it feels like sunlight, even as she wakes to a cool, dim room.

She unpacks her few belongings — she has brought clothes of course, and her best woolen coat so she might yet enjoy the garden paths. She has brought her journals, her acrylics, but forgot her canvases propped in her apartment’s entry. Next winter, she will bring them. Brushes, charcoals, and crayons, and the case Valo made of willow wood to enclose them all. There is no room she prefers over another for painting; everyone says how odd , for aren’t artists supposed to favor morning’s clean light? If I were an artist, she says to them, and laughs for too many reasons. Halla has painted one hundred and twenty-one canvasses, several of which have sold for auspicious amounts, three of which reside within a museum, yet no one she crosses paths with knows her name.

Within the villa, there are rooms Halla will not enter, rooms where no light falls. These rooms are fashioned belowground, without windows. They smell of dirt and damp, and every winter they are coldest of all. She cannot bring herself to venture down the steps — there are fourteen, each of sturdy oak, and a muddy bootprint occupies the last four. She does not ask herself how she knows, because she has already pushed the knowledge aside. She will not think on it. Not of the sliver of light that filters down from the half-cocked door, not the way that sliver is swallowed entire when the door closes (the door, it squeaks). The perfect black of those rooms is as a contained scream, something that cannot ever get out, something that cannot ever gallop down the road that leads someplace she will never go.

Within the villa, there are rooms Halla treasures even above the uppermost room. The uppermost room has its delights, but it is not the kitchen with its metal breadbox, nor the conservatory with its fabric-draped piano. If she were judging as an artist, she might say the conservatory has the best light, facing south, made entirely of windows so as to catch every droplet of light it might. It is, she might say, the antithesis of the rooms below, but she knows no words so grand. She studies the windowed walls and knows, the way she knows the dark rooms she cannot think of, the conservatory will not do. She begins on the ground floor, between slender paned windows that spill columns of light in broad stripes down the wood floor.

The wall is twelve feet long, perhaps more. She moves paint-wet hands over the rough plaster, having no idea what she means to make. She watches the shapes that take form beneath her hands, and the way light crosses shadow, to see what she might make of them; she tiptoes to reach higher, then drags a chair, a bureau, and at last kneels upon the uppermost rung of a ladder she retrieved from the pantry as her hands assemble a stormy sky across the wall’s highest edge. She does not recognize the sky at first, only comes see what it is when she has climbed back down, and looks upon it from the floor, her feet bare and cold, paint drying upon her hands: it is the sliver of sky made by the closing door when belowground.

She drenches her hands in black acrylic to erase what she has wrought. The night sky handprints its way over the storm to obliterate it and now when she stands before the wall, she exhales in relief and ease, for the storm is gone. The night sky is clear and pricked with a thousand winter stars. She knows this sky, it is the clear sky framed by the garden’s leafless trees. She patches every bit of gray beneath her blackened hands, until even the floor bears her painted fingerprints, and only then does she think to wash, to eat a meager dinner, and fold herself into bed.

The room fades with consciousness and Halla is no longer in the villa, but the rotting windmill clinging to the river two miles up the long road. She has climbed to the highest chamber of the mill, where a thick post stands in the center and the floor spirals outward in a decomposing fan. There is a window, but it folds inward from its outermost edges, the glass long ago shattered. From the window, she can glimpse the villa — if she leaves a light lit within the kitchen, it is a bright pinprick to mark her way in the darkness, but she extinguished all the lights tonight. Halla is barefoot and bloody-mouthed and dancing in the arms of a creature she cannot name. It moves the way wind moves, quick and unseen, and the room blurs around her, until she can no longer see even the villa’s roofline out the collapsing window.

Unable to see the villa, she closes her eyes, and dances until her limbs are as ice. She clings to the idea of being wheeled in strong arms, spun like sweetest, shining sugar so she cannot tell up from down. She leans in, hopeful of a lover’s kiss, but it is not a kiss that steals past her lips. It is unrelenting winter, biting lips and tongue until Halla would cry out, but winter has stolen her voice, too. She wants to say stop, every line of her body says stop, but she wheels on until her feet are as bloodied as her mouth. The strong hands hold her from every angle, digging. She lifts a hand and searing heat tracks a path across her knuckles.

The room Halla has taken has one window, high and clear, and the cool morning air pouring through its opened panes wakes her. The blankets are rucked to the foot of the bed, and her skin is gooseflesh. She cannot remember opening the window, but balances upon the headboard to close it; the frame is cold, edged with frost that bears the mark of three long fingers having lain there long enough and recently enough to melt the frost and not have it reform. Halla’s entire body twitches as she sets the latch and drops back to the mattress. She stares at the window, brightening as the sun rises in the east, then at last convinces herself to bathe and dress.

In the tub, she finds the bruise on the outside of her left thigh, tender and black as if fresh. She winces to touch it, and by the time she has climbed out, wrapped herself in a towel, and dragged a comb through her hair, has convinced herself it happened as she carried her bags into the villa the day before. Perhaps her willow case, perhaps the easel. The bruise aches the whole day through, a constant reminder even as Halla believes she has set it from her thoughts. When she puts weight on her left leg, it aches deep inside. When she turns to reach for something on a high shelf. When she sits down to her solitary lunch. Unthinking, her fingers slide down to her thigh and press and she winces as if only discovering the wound. Halla balls her hand into a fist, brings it to the tabletop, and thinks backward.

The easel slipped from her hand as she maneuvered it through the slim entry, she tells herself, and as she cleans up her dishes she has nearly convinced herself of an icy front step, the slip of a foot, the way the easel had caught between her leg at the doorframe as she sought to regain her balance. Nearly. Halla turns her bowl upside down on a tea towel and moves for the back door, drawing her woolen coat around her before latching the door behind. The day is too warm to stay inside and she wants to study the tracery of tree branches across the half-frozen fountain.

The shadows look like cracks, and if Halla stares at them overly long, their blackness deepens, as if a new world entire will open within them. She thinks she can see worms tunneling through them and perhaps they are not branches at all, but tracks of earthworms on their way elsewhere. Pressing her fingers to them reveals only shadows — and a red slash across her knuckles. The mark recalls the ache in her thigh and she shifts her weight to her right foot, closing her hand into a fist again. The skin crackles, dry and cold.

Halla shoves her hands into her pockets and wanders the garden path, from the fountain in the center, to the strand of rowan trees at the outmost edge. The trees should have lost their leaves, but within their group there is still one wholly dressed. Halla reaches for it, but sees the broken branch on the nearest tree. She cannot remember it, but fashions a story of how she tore the branch free in haste, how she needed it for her art, how it whipped across her knuckles and —

“Oh! Hello?”

The voice startles Halla so, she takes a stumbling step backward. She was unaware of any property so close that another person could simply wander up into her own garden, but here wanders a woman, a lavender scarf wrapped around her head, tucked into the collar of her own woolen coat. The breeze snaps a silver curl of hair free and the woman tucks it back and laughs. The sound is as startling as her voice; Halla takes another step back.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, dear — had absolutely no idea anyone was out here this time of year. Are you renting the old place?” Her eyes skip past Halla, to the villa walls, and back again. Eyes that have grown wary. “I — Well. I didn’t think —”

But Halla has already turned away. She refuses to find her own voice and moves with sure steps toward the villa’s rising walls. In the daylight, they are the color of fresh cream, trimmed with a color that calls to mind the copper-bottomed kettles that hang in the kitchen. It is the kitchen she seeks, not turning to see if the woman follows; only once Halla has latched the kitchen door does she look. She peers through the paned glass down the long path that has brought her here and sees no one. She stands for so long that she is aware of how the light changes, how the shadows shift closer to the house. How they close over and keep the rest of the world at a pleasant distance.

Only when Halla is certain she has not been followed does she unbutton her coat. She folds it onto the chair beside the door, and moves toward the dishes, only to find they have been cleared away. The towel drapes the edge of the sink and her bowl is in its place in the cupboard and Halla cannot remember.

This is when she hears the first footstep. The drag of a foot against the front entry, as if someone has kicked the front door. Anger rises sharp in her throat — it is hot and salty as stone, and maybe it is vomit and not anger at all — but Halla freezes, torn between staying and running. It is the old woman, she tells herself. A nosy neighbor who will invite herself to tea, who will discover the painting that —

Halla finds herself in the front room, her leg aching as she stares at the painting begun upon the wall. Where night once closed over the storm clouds, billowing crimson now holds sway; the night has been eaten by a rush of color she cannot expl —

The sound at the door again. Halla turns, putting the painting to her back, backing into the wall that smells fresh, that is still tacky beneath her palms. She counts to one hundred, and one hundred more, then moves for the front door. She pauses in the front hall, long enough to again gauge the way the light moves, the time passes, the sound does not come. At the door, she tiptoes up until she can see out the small peep window, and the porch is empty. The yard is empty. The field beyond is empty to the treeline; the river tumbles just beyond her sight, but nothing moves in the fading daylight, not even her heart.

She tells herself she sleeps perfectly well that night. The doors are locked, the lights are out — she cannot see the pinprick of light from the windmill’s rotting window and that knowledge claws at her. Amid all the darkness, there should be a dot of light, but there is nothing. Halla wheels directionless and her body is opened, studied; she feels the life flowing out of her. Her limbs grow heavy as if with ice, and she cannot shake it, cannot throw the weight off and crawl free. Her voice is once again taken; she fancies it sealed into a box, set upon a high shelf, but the windmill has no shelves that have not already fallen into memory. She reaches, but there is nothing to reclaim.

There is the dance and within its nauseating motion, the memory of the old woman, the way her eyes skittered nervous to the villa walls. The old place. She didn’t think — Didn’t think anyone was there? Only ever me, Halla thinks, and tries to force herself awake, but she is not dreaming and there is nothing to wake from. She is awake, splinters pricking her toes as she climbs down the windmill’s decaying steps. Each step gives with her weight, damp and cold, and snow spits from the black sky when she emerges. The long walk to the villa is silent; she pauses by the line of rowans and rips bare branches free, wondering at the tree that has not shed its leaves.

Over the front door, she weaves a lattice of bare rowan branches. She leans this against the doorframe, closes the door softly, and finds herself in the lowermost room. Darkness enfolds her. Already inside, too late, she thinks, and yet sees her bare foot framed within the muddy bootprint that occupies the last four steps here. Already inside. She steps into each print, until she is upon the floor, until her body is bent and bruised and burned out.

Come morning, Halla’s hands are striped with fresh welts and she cannot remember. She presses her coffee and drinks in the watery light that streams through the kitchen window. She watches the garden and it does not move. There are no footprints through the snow, nor a lattice of branches across her door. She returns to her painting and it is again covered in black, the crimson only the barest thread around its outermost edge. Halla fingers the crimson line and it runs wet beneath her fingertip.

She hears Michel at the back door sometime after noon; she hears him hesitate after he sets the box of groceries down. He always lingers and she pictures his head bent to the door, black lamb’s curls gathering snow because he lingers so long. She pictures his hand pressed to the door’s window, fingers folding into a loose fist to knock, although he never actually knocks. He knows she will say nothing to him, even if she comes to the door. She will take her groceries and his note, and close the door without a word. Michel’s eyes will say everything he wishes her to; if you need anything else, but I need is as unfamiliar to her as the desire for social interaction. What she needs, the villa gives her. Silence, solitude, the space to spread her paint across the walls, though she has permission for no such thing. ( I’m letting to an artist, can you imagine, Halla imagines the landlord saying, the old woman clicking her tongue, agreeing artists were trouble, but what could one do when no other would sleep a single night within the villa’s walls?)

She waits for Michel to go and once he has followed his own footprints out of the garden, comes to the door with her hands still wet with paint. She opens the door, fingerprinting the doorknob with chromium oxide green, and brings the box inside. The letter goes into the breadbox along with a fresh loaf; she lines the fingerprinted cans upon the counter, sets the vegetables in the sink, and returns to her work, to find that the green field rioting across the south wall has been covered in gold ochre, that it is burning, plumes of graphite smoke blackening a once-cerulean sky. She leaves the paint, cleaning her hands without taking her eyes from the wall. She does not see the gold ochre wash from her fingers and does not see the graphite that darkens her skirt until she is at the table having dinner. She cannot remember, but imagines that Michel’s note was newly written when he brought it today — perhaps he forgot to write it ahead of time, perhaps he never wrote ahead of time, and only ever balanced paper and pencil against the door’s own window as he wrote. If there is anything you need — if there is anything — and these words smudged onto her fingertips and onto her skirt and this is how it came to be.

Halla washes her dishes and watches the still garden, and soon after bundles herself into her woolen coat, so that she might watch the stars come into the sky. She leaves the light burning low in the kitchen and can see its bright pinprick as she wanders the garden, and this comforts her even though she has not gone far. She does not know why, and laughs at herself — always a child in need of a light. She turns slow circles in the garden until she is vaguely dizzy and the stars are peeking above. She cannot name the stars she sees — she knows no words so grand — but she counts each one until she has lost count, until she stumbles against the edge of the fountain and sits hard. Her breath catches in her throat.

Within the fountain ice, she sees a woman’s face. Her eyes and mouth gape open, fingers splayed against the underside of the ice. Her hair spreads in an ink cloud. It is as if she fell and froze all in the same instant. It is the statue, Halla tells herself, and then sees it is her own face, reflected. She thinks to take this dichotomy inside, to apply this twining effect to her painting, so that a person might see a thing that was at once their own self and something wholly different, to the point of not being understood.

But inside, there is no paint, and Halla cannot find her bed. She stands within the lowermost room and is stripped bare. My coat , she wants to say, but remembers how she wrapped it around the garden statue, how she could not stand to see her coated in ice. Halla stands within the lowermost room, naked, and it is not about her body, but about what it houses, the inextinguishable spark that must reside within her flesh.

She is opened, the seams of her body so well known that it is ritual now. Her forearms where the bones split; the length of her femur, an icicle buried in blood; the path of her stair-step spine. Everywhere she is opened, she aches, and cannot remember — it was the easel, she slipped on ice — long fingers seeking what they never quite find. The thing that makes her create; the thing that feeds her when nothing else does. It is not food; it is not light. It is something within the body entire, something contained, but even when Halla’s womb is split, the long fingers do not find what they seek — even as they themselves place it there. The spark given by the strangeness of the search. Slowly, the fingers piece her back together, mending as best they can, but what is healed is never truly healed; there will be a scar, there shall be an ache.

Morning is unbearable. Halla sits on the side of the bed for long minutes, wondering if she will bleed today, for she feels heavy, as if a hot stone rests within her cunt. She presses her face into her thighs, closes her eyes, but the darkness is repulsive. She throws the blankets back and stumbles to the tub, pushing the thin curtains from the bathroom window, opening the panes to let winter’s chill pour inside as she submerges herself in steaming water. She sits for an hour, adding hot water, waiting for blood. Nothing comes.

She skips breakfast, goes to her paints, and begs them to consume her. She begins fearful, but in the end trusts what she feels inside, what she knows she must do. She does not listen to her body and its hungers, but listens to the thing that is beyond her body — the thing that moves her and floods from her hands. Her mother called it spirit, but only once; her father called it God’s blessing, but only once. Halla calls it necessary .

From the pain that roils inside her, from every wound that claims itself healed, Halla builds worlds upon walls. She sees nothing before she puts hands to plaster; there is no plan within her mind, only a need within her body. From her fingers spill fields and mountains; there come faces and clouds; slowly, dark spaces are pierced by light that never quite gets through. The blackness always eats the light, always whittles the sun to a pinprick, but a point of light nonetheless.

From shaking fingers a windmill rises out of a bloody mouth and folds itself into a black room. Every landscape is riddled with bottomless blacknesses, but a careful path traces between each. If a person were smart enough — she knows no words so grand — a person could navigate their way through the dark, until they reached the constant labyrinth of the garden, to the point where they were reflected in the ice, where they at last found themselves, still and waiting until the season turns, until the ice cracks and bleeds water into the ground.

But the long fingers are not so patient. From every point she has been opened, Halla bleeds into the dirt of the lowermost room, until she thinks that at last she will die, it will cease, and her works will be found — no one will know who came to the villa, no one will know the name of the painter as the spring light traces its way across the walls. Halla bleeds into the dirt, tries to lift her arms, but is pinned in place, a stone upon her tongue. The stone is hot and tastes of salt and across its curved edge, Halla sees briefly the eyes of another (only myself reflected, she thinks). She tries to reach for this person, and cannot move.

In the uppermost room, Halla waits for the other to crawl up her legs. She can feel it crouched at the foot of the bed after having carried her here — this is the story, she was carried, she did not crawl up the stairs, dragging her broken body; she was carried with concern and placed upon the narrow bed even though she hates the sunlight’s waking heat. She waits for the other to move up her legs, up her hips where it will settle and wait in return. She waits, but it does not happen.

When she can rise, she is not willing to place her feet upon the floor. She draws her legs into her chest and wraps her arms around. She peers at the floor, at the darkness that gathers beneath her bed, and understands the space may house a menace of a size that could overwhelm her. The bed is narrow, the darkness is wide, and Halla stares at the sunlight as it fragments through the window, as it spills across her with warm brightness, and she exhales.

At last the sunlight has its way with the darkness and chases it back enough to allow Halla to step from the bed. She thinks the floor and stairs should be dirty with mud and blood, but they are clean, and she shakes off the bad dream as she does any other. Her body aches, but it is a release of pain she seeks now, one she finds with fingers and paints. She climbs upon the top of the china cabinet, stretches herself flat, and anoints the ceiling.

Over the course of the day and into the night, the face she saw in the darkness takes shape and though it is composed of darkness, Halla fingerprints a pinpoint of light within its eye. If there were no light at all, she reasons, she could not see — there must have been light. A light that burned the length of the river; a sliver of sky reaching from the closing door. Halla can taste the salty stone on her tongue, but paints until she is drained of every taste, until the spark of the idea has flown from her and into the walls. Emptied of the idea, she slides to the floor and does not look upon her work.

Halla does not wash the paint from her hands, so when they alight upon the face in the darkness of the longest night, she leaves prints, soft-edged and bright. She fingerprints light onto the darkness and allows the darkness to gaze upon what she has made of it. The darkness howls at the sight of itself, but does not withdraw. It opens her as it ever has. It will not take the longer path between the bottomless blacknesses because it is easier to tear a thing apart than it is to wander. It parts her with fingers and tongue, seeking a thing she cannot explain, a thing it covets.

Halla does not wake, for this is never quite sleep. When at last she rises and washes her hands clean, she cannot recall the dream that held her, but her body aches, is wetly swollen. This sensation has become familiar, is welcomed. It was a good dream that bore beautiful art, and she will leave knowing her season at the villa was not wasted.

She is carrying her easel out the back door when Michel arrives. He is not carrying a box of groceries, only a small folded piece of paper between his long fingers. He stops at the sight of her, startled she would be there, that she would not wait for him to go. But his expression has not changed, his eyes so wide and dark in their study of her, as if they cannot turn away. Halla thinks she fingerprinted light into those eyes, knows his face graces the villa’s ceiling, but tells herself she is mistaken.

Michel closes the space between them, offering the note, and Halla takes it, but as with the others does not read it. It is pretense only, a way to explain what cannot otherwise be explained. She did not come for social interaction any more than Michel came for groceries. He turns without a word — Halla already knows what he sounds like when he howls. Knows precisely how his long fingers open her skin, searching for a thing he does not himself possess. He walks up the long road to the windmill and will only return to gobble the paint from the walls once she has truly gone. She will take the path around the house, to the cab that will carry her home. Next winter, Halla thinks, I will bring canvas.

Every winter, Halla rents the Villa Couloir on the banks of the Ruisseau de Rieu Ferré for its quiet, its darkness. Near the arch of the old stone bridge, it has a view of little else — skeletal trees, the shadow of a ruined windmill, a long road leading someplace Halla will never go.

E. Catherine Tobler has never slept in a haunted French villa — but you should ask her about the haunted house near her childhood home sometime. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld , Lightspeed , and on the Sturgeon Award ballot. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, www.ecatherine.com .

After We Walked Away

by Erica L. Satifka | 3622 words

3,700 Words

The regret sets in when they hit Iowa.

“We shouldn’t have left,” she says. Knees drawn up to her chin, lower lip trembling. “It was a mistake.”

He can’t disagree. He pulls the rental car into a gas station, the front bumper only barely scraping the back of an idling truck. The truck driver, a red-faced, big-bearded man, exits the cab. His massive slab of a hand buries itself in the driver’s-side window. The shattered window looks like the stars that used to sparkle above the spires of the Solved City, except not really as nice.

“A big mistake,” she says.

He frowns at her. She is his beloved, but right now she’s not helping anything.

After a few moments, the truck driver turns and leaves, though not before launching a projectile of spit on the destroyed window. He waits until the large ruddy man is long gone, then goes into the station.

Hot dogs with cheese . It sounds hearty enough. He fishes the crumpled slips of paper money he’d received from the town alders from his pocket and lays them out on the clerk’s counter.

Her eyes widen. “Mister, you’d better put that away.”

He squints at the bills, does the math. “Is it not enough?” The hot dogs with cheese carry no price tag.

The clerk rolls her eyes and slides three of the bills back to him. She pockets the rest. With a burning shame, he realizes what he’s done, but it’s too late to correct it now. He slides the bills back into his pack.

He hands one of the hot dogs with cheese to his beloved, and takes the other for himself. The unfamiliar food roils in their stomachs, and they both spatter the interior of the car with bits of fatty pork and too-sweet soda.

They sleep in the car.

That was the first day.

§

The first thing you lose when you leave the Solved City is the name of the city itself. Its location, its coordinates, are cut from your mind like a tumor and replaced with some of the things necessary to survive in the world beyond its gates.

The second thing taken is your name. You can get another one, but it won’t be the same. Out of the Solved City, your true name becomes unpronounceable.

“I’m Blank,” says the nameless woman. She’s finally stopped crying, four days after they left those gates behind forever, though her stomach still hasn’t settled from the alien food.

“I’m Cipher,” says the nameless man.

What you take isn’t worth nearly as much as what you lose, and everyone knows it.

§

With the rest of the bills, they rent an apartment in a tumbledown building where rats run through the halls every night. There were no rats in the Solved City.

Lots of peacocks, though. And golden horses with manes that glowed like the sun, and chittering bats that ate right out of your hands.

Blank takes a job at a titty bar down by the harbor, dancing for drunk men who ogle her soft brown skin. Sometimes she comes home with beer sloshed on her ankles, soaking through her socks. She goes through a lot of socks.

Cipher slings sandwiches at a food cart in the local park, under the watchful eye of a gruff man whose drawling accent Cipher can barely understand. Cipher teaches himself not to gag at the barrels of pickled meat crusted with pink slime, and the wafts of odiferous sweat that drip from the gruff man’s armpits.

Only once does the gruff man attempt conversation. “Where you from, kid?” He knows Cipher isn’t from here. The man from the Solved City has no credit, no government identification, and must be paid from the till instead of through a seamless, paperless online exchange.

“I don’t know.”

After that, the conversations stop, though Cipher still gets his fistful of cash every week.

§

The dirt path that leads from the Solved City is worn with the footsteps of hundreds of reverse pilgrims. Thousands, maybe. Almost half the footsteps appear to halt at a point perhaps fifty feet from the gilded gates, where they circle back toward the city where they belong. But there’s no getting back once you’ve left.

There are more corpses on the path than you’d expect there to be, desiccated by the heat of the sun. Empty eye sockets baking, worms in some of them. Mouths outstretched toward the cruel outdoors.

The Solved City is temperate, but the land around it is not.

“Maybe it’s in Arizona,” Blank says, looking at a map spread out on the pockmarked floor of their apartment. “New Mexico?”

“No,” Cipher says, shaking his head. He’s seen photographs of those desert lands, and they are nothing like the land that surrounds the Solved City.

“But it has to be somewhere!” she cries out. The map is pimpled with likely locations marked out in pink and yellow highlighter. “It exists .”

“Of course it exists. We were there. We were born there.” He outlines a highway in yellow. “We’re so close.”

§

She hates the children because they remind her of the child.

They crowd the outside of Blank and Cipher’s apartment building, the children, squatting amid the discarded condoms and half-rotted rat corpses. He’s learned to give them small trinkets: a scrap of food, a bit of lint, pennies that have been through the dryer. They snatch the offerings from his hand like greedy birds, and in return, don’t bother him too much when he comes back to the apartment from another long shift.

She, however, isn’t as charitable.

“Look at those things,” she says, peering down at the street through a slit in the blinds. The abandoned playground across the street is full of spindly children, who cavort on the rusted equipment until the drug dealers drive them out around dusk. “Little animals. They barely even know where they are.”

“They’re not animals.” But he knows, he knows , that she’s not talking about these children. She’s talking about the child.

The child doesn’t know where it is. It has no idea that it lives in a vault five stories below the central plaza of the Solved City. It is a milk-white little bug, left so long in the vault that its eyes have mostly ceased to work. It knows only a few phrases, like “fuck you” and “nasty thing” and “you little shit.” Sometimes it repeats the words and the city alders wash its mouth out with soap.

It has no gender, because that would increase its humanity, and decrease the potency of the violence-magic.

It has no name, because then it might be a person.

It has no wants, no interests, no friends and no family.

It’s what keeps the Solved City afloat, and it’s the reason they left.

§

When you turn seventeen in the Solved City, the alders show you the child. It’s an event, like your first period, or the first time you climb by yourself onto the back of one of the golden stallions that roam the streets.

The alders take you into City Hall. You’ve been there before, on countless school trips. They lead you to a perfectly normal steel door with no markings on it. Its lack of markings is a marking.

You are led downwards. All the way downwards. You’ve never been so far underground. As you descend you start to hear voices. You feel cold in a way you’ve never felt before. Just inside the edges of your vision you see a movement, as if from an animal.

Inside, on a pad of filthy burlap, sits a child of perhaps seven. Its skin is the color of new paper. One of its arms has been ripped off at the elbow, leaving a rotted stump. When it sees the group of visitors, it soils itself, audibly.

“Look at the child,” the alderman says. “He suffers so you can live.”

The teenager who will grow up to be Cipher feels his lunch of roasted pheasant and heirloom tomatoes rise in his throat. He forces it back down, and makes himself look at the child. Around him he can hear his classmates shifting uncomfortably.

“Your lives are pleasant. You know that out there,” the alderman continues, not having to qualify the out there , “there are things worse than this. Sweatshops. Gangs. Mass murder. We only have this child. And we take care of it, in our own way. That’s more than they’d do out there .” He pats the child on its head, mussing its sparse, limp hair.

Cipher looks around, his breath catching. He wants to run up there, tear the shirt from his back, and wrap the child inside, carrying it away from this horrible place. But something he can’t identify holds him back.

Most of his classmates are nodding. He keeps his head still, his mouth closed.

An alderwoman enters the ill-lit basement. She’s someone Cipher has seen before, a kindly fair-haired merchant who never has a harsh word for anyone. He likes her. But now her eyes have a different cast to them. She takes a switchblade from the depths of her robe.

“You fucking piece of shit!” screams the alderwoman in an unearthly tone as she deftly slices one of the child’s fingers off, producing a gush of sickly, pinkish blood. Cipher’s stomach lurches and he moans, earning him a sharp look from the alderwoman.

The boy at Cipher’s side faints, his head coming down hard on Cipher’s shin.

“This is for you !” the alderwoman says. She picks the child up from its burlap mat and shakes it until its teeth rattle. Suddenly, she drops it and becomes calm, slipping into a choreographed speech she’s recited to countless parades of adolescents. “Paradise always comes at a price. Here in the Solved City, we torture not the many, only the one. We have concentrated the suffering to a single point, so that all of you may live in peace. There is no other way, do you see? Somebody must suffer, and this child knows nothing else.”

“We give it purpose,” the alderman says. He removes a small medical kit from his pocket and dresses the child’s wound. “The child needs us. Truly, it’s no worse off at our hands.”

No , Cipher thinks. No, it’s wrong. I have to help it! But what can he do? They won’t let him snatch the child and spirit it away, and he can’t bring himself to attack either of the alders. He pushes the unconscious boy from him with a toe.

Suddenly, the alderwoman drops her blood-spattered knife and stares at the teenager who will be Cipher. “Are you going to take its place?” She points at Cipher, jabbing her finger into his chest until he stumbles backwards. “Just come up here right now, kid.” She flicks her wrist at the filthy corner where the child lays.

Cipher’s face burns with shame, and he shrinks at her touch. He starts to choke out a reply, but by the time he can speak, she’s already halfway down the line of onlookers, asking them the same question. It’s just another part of the routine.

The alderman claps his hands, calling them all back to attention. “We have a gift here in the Solved City, a precious resource. See it. Know it exists. Remember it. Are there any questions?”

There are, but nobody says a word.

The child picks up its severed finger and pops it into its own toothless maw.

§

Blank’s out of the house tonight. She’s often out of the house anymore.

Cipher eases himself into the recliner they pulled from a Dumpster. It smells like hot dogs with cheese. His body hurts right down to the bone. He pops the top off a beer, which is far inferior to the elixirs they had in the Solved City, but it will do.

The maps remain on the coffee table. They haven’t looked at the maps in weeks.

He dozes, awakening at some indistinct point when Blank comes through the door. Her hair is wet and matted from the rain.

“Where were you?” he asks, though he doesn’t really care. Blank’s life is her own to live.

“Out.”

Is that guilt he senses in her lovely, sylph-like face? What could Blank possibly be guilty of? He shrugs it off. “I didn’t make anything for dinner.”

“That’s all right. I’m not hungry.” In fact, she looks radiant. Or at least better than Cipher, anyway.

“I am.” He heaves himself from the recliner and goes to the kitchen. He opens a can of ravioli laced with unpronounceable chemicals. Cipher gags as he eats; even after six months away, he’s still not used to the food here.

She drops her purse on the coffee table, right over the marked-up maps. He frowns a little at this.

After she leaves the next morning, there’s a red spot in the middle of Wyoming. He stares at this spot for a long time.

§

When you leave the pleasant order of the Solved City for the sun-blasted world beyond, you are not the only one who is changed. The minds of the ones you leave behind are similarly erased.

Cipher thinks about this. He knows that there are people he went to school with who suddenly didn’t exist, but he doesn’t recall their faces. He doesn’t recall their voices or their names or mannerisms. There is a lack there, soon to be filled up, like a hole in sand before the tide rolls in.

It doesn’t make you sad, this lack. It’s just there.

Cipher is glad that his parents don’t remember him. The Solved City wouldn’t be much of a paradise if parents longed for their lost children, if lovers were separated because one of them could stand the existence of the child and the other one couldn’t.

Cipher, of course, remembers everything.

§

Once, when they were still living in the Solved City, Blank asked Cipher if the child’s mother remembered it, if she thought about it at all. That should have been the first sign that there was something wrong with Blank.

§

On a day when they’re both free from work, Cipher convinces Blank to sit down in front of the maps and keep searching. They spend a few hours drawing lines across the crumpled gas station map when Blank starts screaming and upends the table.

“It wasn’t worth it! Do you want to know what I saw today? A dead kid, frozen in the alley. She’d been there for days , Cipher. The rats had eaten her nose.”

Cipher blinks. He doesn’t know what to believe. “Did you call the police?”

“Like they’d give a shit.” She starts to pace, running her hands through her black hair. “Ten people were killed last week, all across the city. Gangs, drugs, beatings. There was nothing like this where we came from. Nothing .”

“No. There was something worse.”

She laughs, darkly. “Was there? At least we kept it contained. At least we ... harnessed it somehow. The child, it suffered for us. What do these people suffer for?”

Cipher tries to think of an answer that won’t stoke Blank’s anger. “Freedom?”

“Yes, the freedom to live in a shithole.” She wheels around and slams the door to their bedroom.

Cipher waits a few beats, and then rummages through Blank’s purse. He needs money for takeout. It’s not just free here.

Inside he finds money and also a nose wrapped in clear plastic. He pockets it, leaving the cash.

§

It’s not that the gentle folk of the Solved City don’t think about the child. In fact, they think about the child a lot . They think about the child every time they take the solar-powered tram to the central square. They think about the child every time they brush their golden stallions.

The child shows up in their dreams. Sometimes it appears whole and happy. Sometimes it appears as it is, mangled and full of one-way hate.

What the people of the Solved City don’t do, what they have never done, is talk about the child. Once you leave the child’s oubliette, the existence of the child becomes a conversation you hold with yourself alone. You live well for the child. Because its life is terrible beyond the comprehension of any person in the Solved City (though not beyond the comprehension of those outside), your life must be wonderful. To make the child’s suffering worth anything at all, you must live . And you do.

This is the violence-magic. This is the city’s, and the child’s, gift to you.

Anyone can visit the child, assuming they don’t try to go outside of the normal city hall business hours. You can just walk right on inside. But why would you want to?

§

The day after their argument, Cipher follows Blank down to the harbor. The titty bar where she works is lit up with Christmas lights half burned out and flickering.

He doesn’t go inside. He doesn’t want to see Blank like she is at work, her creamy skin sloshed with beer and engulfed with cigarette smoke. He doesn’t even want to be here at all, but he has to know .

When she leaves, he follows her, through the streets of this new shithole that is now their home. She doesn’t go to the bus stop. She slips into a warehouse.

Cipher waits five beats and goes inside.

It’s black as pitch in there, black as Blank’s hair. He used to love burying his face in that hair, breathing in the essence of her. Blank won’t let him touch her any more.

“Honey?” he says. He takes his cell phone out of his pocket and turns on the flashlight app. The warehouse is like so many warehouses outside of the Solved City. It hasn’t held actual products in at least twenty years, and is now home to rats, mice, spiders, termites, stray cats, and occasionally, people.

No people here now, though. That’s good. Cipher continues to plumb the warehouse’s depths, swinging the flashlight before him like a beacon.

“Blank?” he says, calling out her false name a little louder.

Down one of the narrow corridors, there is a cry. A cat? Does Blank have a stray cat down there? It’s his only lead, so Cipher follows it where it goes.

It leads to an unmarked door frosted with rust. Cipher pushes all his weight against the door. Blank is there, a bat in her hands. A cage is also there. So is a child.

§

During their long ride from the Solved City, at a flea-infested Motel 6 in Moline, Illinois, Cipher laid awake. Beside him, Blank was locked in an uneasy slumber, her regret causing her limbs to seize and twitch.

Had leaving been his decision? Or hers? Or both of theirs, together? Certainly, she had been more immediately contemptuous of the violence-magic that held the Solved City together. She hadn’t wanted to leave at first. She wanted to tear the whole system down .

He can’t imagine his life without her. But if he’d stayed behind, surely he’d have still been happy. Surely, the lack that appeared after the disappearance of other emigrants would have showed up for her too until eventually, she’d be a shadow of a memory, and maybe not even that. He’d have found another lover, a woman or man who managed to live happy despite the violence-magic, or if the science was true, because of it.

She’s worth it , he thought on a cold night as arguments echoed across the motel’s parking lot, isn’t she?

She is. She has to be.

§

He swings the door shut and vomits all the contents of his stomach across the concrete floor. She doesn’t come out to see if he’s all right.

When he feels able to face it again, he pushes the door back open and she’s still there, above the iron cage, the metal bat in her hands.

“What are you doing ?!” Cipher finds some reserve of strength hidden like lint in the bottom of a pocket. He lurches forward and wrests the bat away from Blank. There’s hair on it. “What are you fucking doing?!”

Her mouth gapes open. She doesn’t have a response.

“I’m ... I’m gonna have to tell someone about this.” But how can he? When he knows what they’ll do to her in prison, this naïve woman of the Solved City, not to mention that she makes four-fifths of their combined rent?

“I’m making people happy !” She spits at the mostly dead child in the cage and stalks out, slipping only slightly on the upchucked sandwich fixings at the door’s threshold.

Cipher looks down at the mess in the cage. Whereas the child beneath city hall radiated a bouquet of emotions, from fear to hate to perplexity, this child shows only terror. Terror of Blank. Terror of him .

It won’t survive long, so he does the merciful thing.

When he returns to their apartment, most of her belongings — not that there were ever many — are gone. So is she.

Before long, so is he.

§

He rents a house with two guys from Craigslist who seem to tolerate him okay. They don’t ask him many questions. He doesn’t ask them any questions at all.

He takes a normal name like Tom or Mitch. Maybe that was his real name back in the Solved City. It’s definitely his real name now.

He doesn’t look for the city, though he thinks about it every moment of his life for the rest of his life. He doesn’t look for Blank. He thinks about Blank less often than he thinks about the Solved City, though still too much. That wound doesn’t glaze over and there is no lack.

He grows old. He moves to a different city, one less pockmarked by violence and ruin, but when you come from the Solved City, any violence is too much. Any violence except that visited upon the child, the child that makes the magic happen.

Ten years later, after he has his own child with a woman he met in the elevator at his new job in his new city, he walks out into the desert and lets the sand erase his path.

Erica L. Satifka is a writer and/or friendly artificial construct, forged in a heady mix of iced coffee and sarcasm. She enjoys rainy days, questioning reality, ignoring her to-do list, and adding to her collection of tattoos. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld , Shimmer, Lightspeed , and Intergalactic Medicine Show , and her debut novel Stay Crazy was released in August 2016 by Apex Publications. Originally from Pittsburgh, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse Rob and an indeterminate number of cats.

Shadow

by Tade Thompson | 1226 words

1,200 Words

I met a man with no shadow today.

He crossed into the village limits near dusk, furtive in movements but resolute in expression. He wanted to find the Mamman. He did not understand my description of the route, partly because he spoke gutter Yoruba learnt from leather traders and partly because I have a stutter.

I decided to take him there because I thought it was a very sad thing losing one’s shadow. He was grateful, but fell silent after our initial conversation. I told him to wait while I checked my traps, for I am a hunter.

I had caught one bush rat and the leg of an antelope who had chewed his limb off in order to escape my pot. I reset the traps under the studious gaze of the man with no shadow.

The sun hid beneath the horizon, and even my shadow did not survive. We crossed the brook of tears without getting our feet wet and waved greeting to the three drinkers at the palm wine bar, men with whom I had been circumcised, but whose features had been blunted by ogogoro , their bodies the harvest of a misspent youth.

We walked past my house and I handed my puzzled wife my belt of charms. I did not kiss her or show affection in front of the stranger. I kept the rifle slung over my shoulder. The Mamman had magic, but gunpowder and lead would work on anything that had a heart, shadowed or not.

§

‘Your shadow is born when you are,’ said the Mamman, ‘but it outlives you. You should cast a shadow until your body rots.’

She was fat, with massive swinging breasts which held intricate tattoos and she had a sensual carelessness about her near-nakedness.

‘You may go,’ she said to me.

I shook my head. ‘I want to hear what he has to say.’

‘Very well.’ To the man she said: ‘What have you brought for me?’

The man unwrapped a small package and laid a dried, blackened object at the Mamman’s side. ‘This is the trigger finger of the greatest warrior my village has ever known.’

‘Did you kill him?’ she asked.

‘No, but it is mine to give away.’ He offered no further explanation.

The Mamman put it away and licked her lips, sat back down. ‘I’ve known two others who lost their shadows in my time.’

‘I did not lose it,’ said the man. ‘I drove it away.’

‘Explain, outlander. I get bored easily and when I’m bored I amuse myself by sucking the brains out of the eyeballs of mouthy customers.’

§

It was a story of war.

The man’s village had been outnumbered by invaders from the north. Fair-skinned, heavily-clothed warriors with curved swords and strange customs. They outnumbered the indigenous people two to one and had mounted cavalry and bows and arrows.

‘The witch doctor had a solution. He would bring alive our shadows, in the process doubling the army strength, but we had to win the battle before sundown because he could only hold the spell from dawn till dusk of one day. We also had to fight alongside our counterparts so that they could find their way back to merge just before sundown. As it turned out the invaders were so afraid of the dark warriors that they fled, but the shadow-selves were more … dishonourable.’

There was a massacre, with the slaughter and sodomization of unarmed men in the process of surrendering.

‘Most of my villagers allowed this, encouraged it even, but I objected. My shadow wished to continue, but I tried to prevent it. It turned on me, but I fought it off. It hissed and sputtered, and slinked away and I did not see it again before sundown. I have not cast a shadow since. It made my wife and family so uncomfortable that they rejected me. I had heard of the subtle skill of the Mamman here. I loaded provisions, left my kinsmen, and here I am.’

§

The Mamman was silent for a long time, and she scratched herself absently. Our shadows flickered in the candlelight, with an eerie gap where the stranger’s should have been.

‘It’s not such a bad thing to lack a shadow self,’ she said.

‘Then give me yours,’ said the man.

The Mamman laughed. It sounded like many jackals at once, and spittle sprayed around. I dared not wipe it off my chin. The woman stood and breadcrumbs dropped to the floor. ‘There are two ways of solving this problem. We can find your errant shadow or take one from a recently-deceased person. The latter will not look like you and may not move at exactly the same moment as you, but nobody will notice who doesn’t observe closely. Choose wisely.’

§

This is how I came to be a resurrectionist, digging into the grave of one Saliu Ogunrombi, who died in the last wave of Yellow Fever.

While we dug, he told me the story of their clan’s greatest warrior, Gani. One of the invaders struck him on the head with a war hammer, and Gani had lost his senses ever since. Became a different man, clumsy, and a falling boulder crushed his arm. The man without a shadow took Gani’s hand after the warrior died. He had two of the petrified fingers left. He gave me one.

There was no moon. There was the rhythmic digging of myself and the man with no shadow. The Mamman sat on a stool waiting, smoking.

The ritual itself was undramatic, and consisted of holding Saliu upright and lighting torches behind him. The Mamman said something to the resultant shadow in old language, and it detached from Saliu. It bobbed over to the stranger and fused with his feet.

We reinterred Saliu. His former shadow leaned towards the grave instead of away from light.

§

At dawn I settled at my wife’s side, freshly showered and with no intention of doing the day’s hunting. Her hand drifted between my legs, but grave digging is tiring work and there was no oak tree for her to climb, just a willow. She muttered something about me spending too much time with the three palm wine drunks.

Before I fell asleep I remembered the last words the Mamman said to me as the man walked away with his new shadow.

‘In a year he will return to us. To me. He will tell me to release him from this shadow.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘He will say his wife has left him again, and the people of his village shun him. He will say the new shadow self has changed his behaviour and he cannot control himself.’

I said nothing.

‘And he will be right.’

‘What is a shadow, Ma?’ I asked. I did not stutter when with her.

‘Sometimes, it is what lurks underneath your face, ready to emerge when you are angry or afraid. Sometimes, a blow from an enemy hammer can release it.’

She shrugged, and walked into the twilight. Presently, I went home.

I looked at the walls of my bedroom, at the shadows receding with the rising sun, and the rise and fall of my wife’s chest.

I slept.

Originally published in Expanded Horizons (2010). Reprinted in The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 2 (Apex Book Company, 2012).

Tade Thompson lives and works in the south of England. His first novel Making Wolf won the 2016 Kitschies Golden Tentacle award for best debut novel. He has written a number of short stories including “Budo” at Escape Pod. His horror novella Gnaw will be released in December from Solaris Books. Rosewater is available now from Apex Book Company.

The Island in the Attic

by Natalia Theodoridou | 1655 words

1,700 Words

Where this story begins is not where it ends. The ending is neither a natural conclusion to the events leading up to it, nor a product of necessity. If you see things in the beginning that you feel foreshadow the ending, if you catch yourself saying “I knew it!” or “Well, it was obvious from the start that she would end up that way,” then know you found these narrative threads within yourself. Predestination and retrojection are not necessarily two different things.

I, for one, remain cynical.

So, first:

§

A FEW THINGS SHE LEARNED ABOUT THE WORLD

§

The attic

My attic has no windows. Its wooden walls are the outer crust of my body. I open my arms and hug me. I place my cheek on the wood and it scratches my skin. I listen to the nightsounds. The heavy breathing of the people of the city. Miles away. The trees. The birds. The beaches. The midnight train. The sound of an expanding universe. The whoosh of the stars as they move farther and farther away at the speed of light — the world is running away and the earth is left behind, swimming lonelier and lonelier in the darkness in between. The Earth will someday be all alone in a dark universe. You’ll see.

I have a clock on the wall, standing still. The time, it says, is 2:45.

I have a mattress on the floor and a blue sheet. I have a box of photographs. I have a lamp emitting yellow light. Some nights I switch her on and look into her eyes; her metallic arms catch fire, my optic nerve is on fire too and then I’m gushing light, but my attic is windowless, my light unseen.

I have nothing more. To say.

I have a child. In the daytime I have a child. Miles away, across the sea.

§

The womb

My ova speak from inside my womb. They are all girls. They are all girls and they do not want to be born.

§

The birds

The birds speak. I thought their stories would be about journeys to distant lands, beautiful passersby and happy princes. I was wrong. They talk about their wings, the wind, the worms. People, to birds, mean nothing.

§

The beaches

Beaches are my favourite places in the whole world. Vast, empty beaches. With powdery sand and quiet waters. If it’s not too much to ask.

Some nights my attic borders a great beach. I walk along its edge. The child too. Miles away.

I lie on the sand and forget where I end and where the sea begins. I am vast as an island.

He is never on the beach. The child and I run across the shore. The child looks like me, a mirror. The waves chase our steps. We leave no trace. The child is water, foam on the sand. He can’t find us.

The beach is boundless. And the sound. Boundless.

§

The photograph

He has a bandaged knee. She’s wearing a dress that leaves her shoulder bare. You can almost make out her left breast.

They look happy. They are on an island. There is a hill with a small tower in the background.

What happened to these people?

I knew them, once.

§

The box

Next to the photographs, the box holds the little teeth of the child. I take them out from time to time, place them on my open palms and study them. I say they are pearls, rare jewels from a distant ocean bed. Which pearl fisher recovered them, my treasure?

§

The floor

The floor of my attic is covered with canvas. The canvas is brown with red diamond shapes. I sit counting them — three, five, seven — my optic nerve blazing and my pores tiny windows with a view to the universe — twenty, thirty, a hundred — until I get dizzy and fall back into a blue sea.

When I emerge, I find grains of sand scattered on the floor.

§

The ceiling

The ceiling is askew. The ceiling breathes. Very slowly. One breath can take more than twenty-four hours.

Tonight, the ceiling is breathing in. I can feel it coming closer. In a little while it will be so low it will push against my chest. I don’t know if I will be able to breathe. Anymore.

§

The rains

It rains all the time these days. I hear the water drum on the roof, the walls. It rains so much that the water is flooding all my thoughts, my memories. All of a sudden it rains in all the childhood parties I can remember, on birthday cakes and bowls of crisps, in the living rooms, on summer beaches and inside the church where I was yoked, at the cemetery (it always rains there, of course) — on the bus the passengers are soaking wet, at uni the students hold umbrellas inside the auditorium, at the supermarket it’s pouring and all the sugar melts and flows in the corridors, and I’m pushing my cart through syrup. Happy.

§

The clock

In my attic, the time has been 2:45 for a long while.

I wonder what one is to do if her watch is unwound and she doesn’t have another. How does she find time again? If her life is unwound and she doesn’t have another? How does she find herself again? (2:45. Day or night? Day? Or Night?) What do you do when your body is unwound and you have no other? How do you find your voice again? My voice is unheard except on the inside / My mind a waterfall of unwound syllables: ne, oi, sa, se, Se, She — Noisenoisenoisenoisenoise —

gather up speed and nail your mind to the wall —

§

The door

Behind the door there is the child. I can smell his salty skin through the cracks. I kneel and press my cheek to the canvas. I think the child behind the door does the same. He is the mirrorchild. I think tonight he might speak to me.

“Can you hear me, child?”

“Are you my mum?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a monster?”

Am I? Am I?

“You shouldn’t be talking to me at this hour,” the child echoes in the man’s voice.

“I know. Go to bed, he’ll hear you.”

“Okay. Are you sure you’re my mum?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Pause. Is he still there?

“I love you, child.”

He doesn’t reply.

§

The ending

Years later, we flee.

It’s one night when the child hits him on the head with a frying pan and lets his monstrous nightmother out of the attic. We board the man’s little boat and sail away, leaving my vast beach behind before dawn breaks the sky. I imagine I am a floating island, drifting away into the sea.

§

Now, the voice changes. This is narrative. It is the undercurrent of the story, where anything can happen:

§

HOW SHE BECAME AN ISLAND

§

When the storm subsides, she looks for the child in the water. She looks and looks but the child is not there; only her face looking back at her from the surface of the sea. A mirror. She falls back onto the boat and hugs her torso. She imagines the child falling over the side of the boat, herself clutching the rim. She screams when the child’s body dissolves in the water, as if he were never there.

The surface of the sea shivers in the breeze, and she would swear she hears it whisper in the voice of the child. She straightens her body and dips her hands in the water. She starts paddling away, towards the rising sun.

§

Days pass. She calls to the child until her voice cracks. Her body stiffens. She keeps reminding herself who she is, for fear that she might turn into something lifeless and stony if she didn’t. She remains still until night falls, heavy and dark but for the faraway stars.

Drop by drop, her boat slips through the ocean. She watches the passing lights travel on the sky’s hunched back. She imagines that the child is in the boat with her; she takes his hand and points his little fingers at the sky: “There,” she says, “these are the North Stars, the seven sisters who, chased by a monster, found a rope leading to the sky and climbed it.” She tells the child about the youngest one sitting in the corner, with her half-eaten foot peering through the folds of her skirt. And there, on the left, the little drum — “If I strike it,” she says, “will you hear it, child? If I dance to its rhythm, will you dance along? Mirrorchild, mirrorchild?”

She closes her empty hand into a fist. She tries to open it again, but can’t; it’s stiff as a stone.

§

Months pass. Her body grows cold and hard over time. One night, as she stands immobile in the saline breeze, her clothes turning into a pillar of salt, she hears the splash of giant steps in the water. An enormous shadow in the shape of a man is wading in the ocean. His feet are the sea, his head is the sky. He reaches out and grabs a star. One by one, he swallows the seven sisters. He eats up the drum and the mighty hunter. The eagle and the hound. And as she watches, she loses her grasp on definitions. What is sky and what is sea? she wonders. Where is earth and where is stars? Have I always been this cold? Have I always been this hard?

Her hardness takes over the boat, becomes one with it, and then her body keeps growing, solid with rock and earth, with salt, and stone. Immense, indefinable, she floats away on an ocean of black ink.

Few are the seamen who can claim to have seen her, and fewer yet those who have trodden on her shores. But they all know the story of the mother who is an island, drifting in the sea until the tide brings her child back to her shores, so he can lie on her sand and watch the starless sky above.

Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar, a dramaturge, and a writer of strange stories. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld , Shimmer , Beneath Ceaseless Skies , and elsewhere. Find out more at www.natalia-theodoridou.com , or follow @natalia_theodor on Twitter.

Rosewater (Novel Excerpt)

by Tade Thompson | 7914 words

CHAPTER ONE

Rosewater: 2066

I’m at the Integrity Bank job for forty minutes before the anxieties kick in. It’s how I usually start my day. This time it’s because of a wedding and a final exam. Not my wedding, not my exam. In my seat by the window I can see, but not hear, the city. This high above Rosewater everything seems orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic curving sluggishly around the dome. I can see the cathedral from here. The window is to my left, and I’m on one end of an oval table with four other contractors. We are on the fifteenth floor, the top. A skylight is open above us, three-foot square, a security grid being the only thing between us and the morning sky. Blue, with flecks of white cloud. No blazing sun yet, but that will come later. The climate in the room is controlled despite the open skylight, a waste of energy for which Integrity Bank is fined weekly. They are willing to take the expense.

Next to me on the right side Bola yawns. She is pregnant and gets very tired these days. She also eats a lot, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I’ve known her two years and she has been pregnant in each of them. I do not fully understand pregnancy. I am an only child and I never grew up around pets or livestock. My education was peripatetic; biology was never a strong interest. Except for microbiology, which I had to master later.

I try to relax and concentrate on the bank customers. The wedding anxiety comes again.

Rising from the centre of the table is a holographic teleprompter. It consists of random swirls of light right now, but within a few minutes it will come alive with text. There is a room adjacent to ours in which the night shift is winding down.

‘I hear they read Dumas last night,’ says Bola.

She’s just making conversation. It is irrelevant what the other shift reads. I smile and say nothing.

The wedding I sense is due in three months. The bride has put on a few pounds and does not know if she should alter the dress or get liposuction. In my opinion, women have two beauties. The outward appearance that everyone sees and the inner, secret beauty that is true and that women show only to the one they love.

Bola is prettier when she is pregnant.

‘Sixty seconds,’ says a voice on the tannoy.

I take a sip of water from the tumbler on the table. The other contractors are new. They don’t dress formally like Bola and I. They wear tank tops and t-shirts and metal in their hair. They have phone implants.

I hate implants of all kinds. I have one. Standard locator with no add-ons. Boring, really, but my employer demands it.

The exam anxiety dies down before I can isolate and explore the source. Fine by me.

The bits of metal these young ones have in their hair come from plane crashes. Lagos, Abuja, Jos, Kano, and all points in between, there have been downed aircraft on every domestic route in Nigeria since the early 2000s. They wear bits of fuselage as protective charms.

There are those among us who are shining ones. We know them on sight-we are caught in a vortex and drawn to them as are everyone else. Bola is one of these. I often catch myself staring at her without knowing why. She often catches me staring at her and winks. Now she unwraps her snack, a few wraps of moin-moin.

‘Go,’ says the tannoy.

The text of Plato’s The Republic scrolls slowly and steadily in ghostly, holographic figures on the cylindrical display. I start to read, as do the others, some silently, others out loud. We enter the xenosphere and set up the bank’s firewall.

Every day about five hundred customers carry out financial transactions at these premises. Wild sensitives probe and push, trying to pick personal data out of the air. I’m talking about dates-of-birth, PINs, mothers’ maiden names, past transactions, all of them lying docile in each customer’s forebrain, in the working memory, waiting to be plucked out by the hungry, untrained, and freebooting sensitives.

Contractors like myself, Bola Martinez, and the metalheads are trained to repel these. And we do. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer. A professor did a study of it once. He found a correlation between the material used for firewalling and the activities of the customer for the rest of the year. A person who had never read Shakespeare would suddenly find snatches of King Lear coming to mind for no apparent reason.

We can trace the intrusions if we want, but Integrity isn’t interested. It’s difficult and expensive to prosecute crimes perpetuated in the xenosphere.

The queues for cash machines, so many people, so many cares and wants and passions. I am tired of filtering the lives of others through my mind.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city …

On entering the xenosphere there is a projected self-image. The untrained, wild sensitives project themselves, but professionals like me are trained to create a controlled, chosen self-image. Mine is a gryphon.

The wild ones have self-images that are not accurate, that do not map to their current selves. It is not deliberate. It takes time for a mental image to correspond to the actual person, although it varies with individuals. A bald man may have a more hirsute self-image for years.

My first attack of the day comes from a middle-aged man from a town house in Yola. He looks reedy and very dark-skinned. I warn him and he backs off. A teenager takes his place so quickly that I think they are in the same physical location as part of a hack farm. Criminal cabals sometimes round up sensitives, yoke them together in a ‘Mumbai-combo’-a call-centre model with serial blackhats.

Either way, I’ve seen it all before. I am already bored.

During the lunch break one of the metalheads comes in and sits by me. He starts to talk shop, telling me of a near-miss intrusion. He looks to be in his twenties, still excited about being a sensitive, finding everything new and fresh and interesting, the opposite of cynical, the opposite of me.

He must be in love. His self-image shows propinquity. He is good enough to mask the other person, but not good enough to mask the fact of his closeness. I see the shadow, the ghost beside him. I don’t mention this out of respect.

The metal he carries is twisted into crucifixes and attached to a single braid on otherwise short hair. This leaves his head on the left temple and coils around his neck, disappearing into the collar of his shirt.

‘I’m Clement,’ he says. ‘I notice you don’t use my name.’

This is true. I was introduced to him by an executive two weeks back, but I forgot his name instantly and have been using pronouns ever since.

‘My name …’

‘You’re Kaaro. I know. Everybody knows you. Excuse me for this, but I have to ask. Is it true that you’ve been inside Utopicity?’

‘That’s a rumour,’ I say.

‘Yes, but is the rumour true?’ asks Clement.

Outside the window the sun is far too slow in its journey across the sky. Why am I here? What am I doing?

‘I’d rather not discuss it.’

‘Are you going tonight?’ he asks.

I know what night it is. I have no interest in going.

‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘I might be busy.’

‘Doing what?’

This boy is rather nosy. I had hoped for a brief, polite exchange, but now I find myself having to concentrate on him, on my answers. He is smiling, being friendly, sociable. I should reciprocate.

‘I’m going with my family,’ says Clement. ‘Why don’t you come with us? I’m sending my number to your phone. All of Rosewater will be there.’

That is the part that bothers me, but I say nothing to Clement. I accept his phone number, and send mine out of politeness, but I do not commit.

Before the end of the working day I get four other invitations to the Opening. I decline most of them, but Bola is not a person I can refuse.

‘My husband has rented a flat for the evening,’ she says, handing me a slip of paper with the address. Her look of disdain tells me if I had the proper implant we would not need to kill trees. ‘Don’t eat. I’ll cook.’

By eighteen hundred hours the last customer has left and we’re all typing at terminals, logging the intrusion attempts, cross-referencing to see if there are any hits, and too tired to joke. We never get feedback on the incident reports. There’s no pattern analysis or trend graph. This data is sucked into a bureaucratic black hole. It’s just getting dark, and we’re all in our own heads now, but passively connected to the xenosphere. I’m vaguely aware that a chess game is going on, but I don’t care between whom. I don’t play so I don’t understand the progress.

‘Hello, Gryphon,’ someone says.

I focus, but it’s gone. She’s gone. Definitely female. I get a wispy impression of a flower in bloom, something blue, but that’s it. I’m too tired or lazy to follow it up, so I punch in my documentation and fill out the electronic time sheet.

I ride the elevator to street level. I have never seen much of the bank. The contractors have access to the express elevator. It’s unmarked and operated by a security guard who sees us, even though we do not see him or his camera. This may as well be magic. The elevator seems like a rather elegant wooden box. There are no buttons and it is unwise to have confidential conversations in there. This time as I leave the operator says, ‘Happy Opening.’ I nod, unsure of which direction to respond in.

The lobby is empty, dark. Columns stand like Victorian dead posed for pictures. The place is usually manned when I go home, but I expect the staff have been allowed to leave early for the Opening.

It’s full night now. The glow from Utopicity’s dome is omnipresent, though not bright enough to read by. The skyline around me blocks direct view, but the light frames every high rise to my left like a rising sun, and is reflected off the ones to my right. This is the reason there are no street lights in Rosewater. I make for Alaba Station, the clockwise platform. The streets are empty save the constable who walks past, swinging her baton. I am wearing a suit so she does not care to harass me. A mosquito whines past my ear, but does not appear to be interested in tasting my blood. By the time I reach the concourse there is a patch of light sweat in each of my armpits. It’s a warm night. I text my flat to reduce internal temperature one degree lower than external.

Alaba Station is crowded with commercial district workers and the queues snake out to the streets, but they are almost all going anticlockwise to Kehinde Station which is closest to the Opening. I hesitate briefly before I buy my ticket. I plan to go home and change, but I wonder if it will be difficult to meet up with Bola and her husband. I have a brief involuntary connection to the xenosphere and a hot, moist surge of anger from a cuckolded husband lances through me. I disconnect and breathe deeply.

I go home. Even though I have a window seat and the dome is visible, I do not look at Utopicity. When I notice the reflected light on the faces of other passengers I close my eyes, though this does not keep out the savoury smell of akara or the sound of their trivial conversation. There’s a saying that everybody in Rosewater dreams of Utopicity at least once every night, however briefly. I know this is not true because I have never dreamed of the place.

That I have somewhere to sit on this train is evidence of the draw of the Opening. The carriages are usually full to bursting and hot, not from heaters, but from body heat and exhalations and despair.

I come off at Atewo after a delay of twenty-five minutes due to a power failure from the north ganglion. I look around for Yaro, but he’s nowhere to be found. Yaro’s a friendly stray dog who sometimes follows me home and whom I feed scraps. I walk from the station to my block, which takes ten minutes. When I get signal again my phone has four messages. Three of them are jobs. The forth is from my employer.

‘Call now. And get a phone implant. This is prehistoric.’

I do not call her. She can wait.

I live in a two-bed, partially automated flat. I could get a better place if I wanted. I have the funds, but not the inclination. I strip, leaving my clothes where they lie, and pick out something casual. I stare at my gun holster, undecided. I cross the room to the wall safe which appears in response to signals from my ID implant. I open it and consider taking my gun. There are two clips of ammo beside it along with a bronze mask and a clear cylinder. The fluid in the cylinder is at rest. I pick it up and shake it, but the liquid is too viscous and it stays in place. I put it back and decide against a weapon.

I shower briefly and head out to the Opening.

How to talk about the Opening?

It is the formation of a pore in the biodome that covers Utopicity. Rosewater is a doughnut-shaped conurbation that surrounds Utopicity. In the early days we actually called it The Doughnut. I was there. I saw it grow from a frontier town of tents and clots of sick people huddling together for warmth into a kind of shanty town of hopefuls and from there into an actual municipality. In its eleven years of existence Utopicity has not taken in a single outsider. I was the last person to traverse the biodome and there will not be another. Rosewater, on the other hand, is the same age, and grows constantly.

Every year, though, the biodome opens for twenty or thirty minutes in the south, in the Kehinde area. All the people in the vicinity of the opening are cured of all physical and some mental ailments. It is also well-known and documented that the outcome is not always good, even if diseases are abolished. There are reconstructions that go wrong, as if the blueprints are warped. Nobody knows why this happens, but there are also people who deliberately injure themselves for the sole purpose of getting “reconstructive surgery.”

Trains are out of the question on a night like this. I take a taxi which drives in the opposite direction first, then describes a wide, southbound arc, taking a circuitous route through the back roads and against the flow of traffic. This works until it doesn’t. Too many cars and motorbikes and bicycles, too many people walking, too many street performers and preachers and out-of-towners. I pay the driver and walk the rest of the way to Bola’s temporary address. This is easy as my path is perpendicular to the crush of pilgrims.

Oshodi Street is far enough from the biodome that the people are not so dense as to impede my progress. Number fifty-one is a tall, narrow four-storey building. The first door is propped open with an empty wooden beer crate. I walk into a hallway that leads to two flats and an elevator. On the top floor, I knock, and Bola lets me in.

One thing hits me immediately: the aroma and heat blast of food which triggers immediate salivation and the drums of hunger in my stomach. Bola hands me field glasses and leads me into the living room. There is a similar pair dangling on a strap around her neck. She wears a shirt with the lower buttons open so that her bare gravid belly pokes out. Her heavy breasts push against the two buttons keeping them in check and I wonder how long the laws of physics will allow this. Two children, male and female, about eight or nine, run around, frenetic, giggling, happy.

‘Wait,’ says Bola. She makes me wait in the middle of the room and returns with a paper plate filled with akara, dodo, and dundu. She leads me by the free hand to the veranda where there are four deck chairs facing the dome. Her husband, Dele, is in one, the next is empty, the third is occupied by a woman I don’t know, and the fourth is for me. Dele Martinez is rotund, jolly, but quiet. I’ve met him many times before and we get along well. Bola introduces the woman as Aminat, a sister, although the way she emphasises the word, this could mean an old friend who is as close as family, not a biological sibling. She’s pleasant enough, smiles with her eyes, has her hair drawn back into a bun of sorts, and is casually dressed in jeans, but is perhaps my age or younger. Bola knows I am single and has made it her mission to find me a mate. I don’t like this because … well, when people match-make they introduce people to you whom they think are sufficiently like you. Each person they bring is a commentary on how they see you. If I’ve never liked anyone Bola has introduced me to does that mean she doesn’t know me well enough or that she does know me, but I hate myself?

I sit down and avoid talking by eating. I avoid eye-contact by using the binoculars.

The crowd is contained in Sanni Square, usually a wide-open space framed by exploitative shops and travel agents, behind which Oshodi Street lurks. A firework goes off, premature, a mistake. Most leave the celebrations till afterwards. Oshodi Street is a good spot. It’s bright from the dome and we are all covered in that creamy blue electric light. Utopicity’s shield is not dazzling, and up close you can see a fluid that ebbs and flows just beneath the surface of the barrier.

The glasses are high-end with infra-red sensitivity and a kind of optional implant hack that brings up individual detail about whoever I focus on, tag information travelling by laser dot and information downloading from satellite. It is a bit like being in the xenosphere; I turn it off because it reminds me of work.

Music wafts up, carried in the night, but unpleasant and cacophonic because it comes from competing religious factions, bombastic individuals and the dome tourists. It is mostly percussion-accompanied chanting.

There are, by my estimate, thousands of people. They are of all colours and creeds: black Nigerians, Arabs, Japanese, Pakistani, Persians, white Europeans, and a mix-mash of others. All hope to be healed or changed in some specific way. They sing and pray to facilitate the opening. The dome is, as always, indifferent to their reverence or sacrilege.

Some hold a rapt, religious awe on their faces and cannot bring themselves to talk, while others shout in a continuous, sustained manner. An Imam has suspended himself from a roof in a harness that looks homemade, and is preaching through a bullhorn. His words are lost in the din which swallows meaning and nuance and shits out a homogenous roar. Fights break out but are quashed in seconds because nobody knows if you have to be “good” to deserve the blessings from Utopicity.

A barricade blocks access to the dome and armed constables form up in front of it. The first civilians are one hundred metres away from Utopicity’s dome, held back by an invisible stanchion. The officers look like they will shoot to kill. This is something they have done in the past, the latest incident being three years back when the crowd showed unprecedented rowdiness. Seventeen dead, although the victims rose during that year’s Opening. They were … destroyed two weeks later as they clearly were not themselves anymore. This happens. Utopicity can restore the body, but not the soul. The god told me that back in ‘55.

I cough from the peppery heat of the akara. The fit drives my vision to the sky briefly and I see a waning gibbous, battling bravely against the light pollution.

I see the press, filming, correspondents talking into microphones. Here and there are lay-scientists with big scanners pointed finger-like towards Utopicity. Skeptics, true believers, in-between, all represented.

I feel a gentle tap on my left shoulder and emerge from the vision. Aminat is looking at me. Bola and her husband have shifted out of earshot.

‘What do you see?’ she asks. She is smiling as if she is in on some joke but unsure if it’s at my expense.

‘People desperate for healing,’ I say. ‘What do you see?’

‘Poverty,’ says Aminat. ‘Spiritual poverty.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.’

‘Are you politically inclined against Utopicity?’

‘No, hardly. I don’t have politics. I just like to examine all angles of an issue. Do you care?’

I shake my head. I don’t want to be here, and if not for Bola’s invitation I would be home contemplating my cholesterol levels. I am intrigued by Aminat, but not enough to want to access her thoughts. She is trying to make conversation, but I don’t like talking about Utopicity. Why then do I live in Rosewater? I should move to Lagos, Abuja, Accra, anywhere but here.

‘I don’t want to be here either,’ says Aminat.

I wonder for a moment if she has read my thoughts, if Bola matched us because she is also a sensitive. That would be irritating.

‘Let’s just go through the motions to keep Bola happy. We can exchange numbers at the end of the evening and never call each other again. I will tell her tomorrow, when she asks, that you were interesting and attentive, but there was no chemistry. And you will say …?’

‘That I enjoyed my evening, and I like you, but we didn’t quite click.’

‘You will also say that I had wonderful shoes and magnificent breasts.’

‘Er … okay.’

‘Good. We have a deal. Shake on it?’

Except, we cannot shake hands because there is oil on mine from the akara, but we touch the back of our hands together, co-conspirators. I find myself smiling at her.

A horn blows and we see a dim spot on the dome, the first sign. The dark spot grows into a patch. I have not seen this as often as I should. I saw it the first few times but stopped bothering after five years.

The patch is roughly circular, with a diameter of six or seven feet. Black as night, as charcoal, as pitch. It looks like those dark bits on the surface of the sun. This is the boring part. It will take half an hour for the first healing to manifest. Right now all is invisible. Microbes flying into the air. The scientists are frenzied now. They take air samples and will try to grow cultures on blood agar. Futile. The xenoforms do not grow on artificial media.

In the balcony everyone except me takes a deep breath, trying to get as much inside their lungs as possible. Aminat breaks her gaze from the dome, twists in her seat and kisses me on the lips. It lasts seconds and nobody else sees it, intent as they are upon the patch. After a while I am not sure it happened at all. I don’t even know what to make of it. I can read minds but I still don’t understand women.

Down below it begins, the first cries of rapture. It is impossible to confirm or know what ailments are taken care of at first. If there is no obvious deformity or stigmata like jaundice, pallor, or a broken bone, there is no visible change except the emotional state of the healed. Already, down at front, younger pilgrims are doing cartwheels and crying with gratitude.

A man brought in on a stretcher gets up. He is wobbly at first, but then walks confidently. Even from this distance I can see the wideness and wildness of his eyes and the rapid flapping of his lips. Newcomers experience disbelief.

This continues in spurts and sometimes ripples that flow through the gathered people. The trivial and the titanic are equally healed.

The patch is shrinking now. At first the scientists and I are the only ones to notice. Their activities become more agitated. One of them shouts at the others, though I cannot tell why.

I hear a tinkle of laughter from beside me. Aminat is laughing with delight, her hands held half an inch from her face and both cheeks moist. She is sniffing. That’s when it occurs to me that she is here to be healed as well.

I get a text at that moment. I look at my palm to read the message off the flexible subcutaneous polymer. My boss again.

Call right now, Kaaro. I am not kidding.

CHAPTER TWO

Rosewater: 2066

It’s the middle of the night when I arrive at Ubar. I come off the last train and there’s a car waiting for me. Ubar is an area between the North Ganglion and the widest part of the River Yemoja. We drive along the banks before turning away into empty roads and dark buildings. The driver stops in front of imposing iron gates and waits for me to get out, then drives off.

I walk into a facility that belongs to the Ministry of Agriculture. From the outside it is a simple, two-storey building with ordinary signage showing the Nigeria Coat-of-Arms covered in dust. Inside there’s a reception and an open plan office. There are framed photographs of the president on one wall and Rosewater’s mayor Jack Jacques on the other. Mundane. I’m buzzed through all of this without delay and my RFID is logged sure as cancer.

I go straight to the elevator down to the sub-levels. These are used and controlled by Section Forty-five, or S45. Most have never heard of this obscure branch of government. I have only heard of them because I work for them. Before that I was a finder and a thief.

Part of my job with S45 is interrogation. I hate interrogations.

It is 0300 hours and we are in a dim meeting room. There are two agents in black suits standing on either side of a prisoner who is naked and tied to a chair. The prisoner is blindfolded. The agents don’t speak and I do not know what information they need. I don’t bother trying to read them because the organisation would not have sent them if they knew anything. This is part of some bureaucrat’s idea of keeping the subject’s mind uncontaminated with expectations. What they want is for me to copy all the information from the subject’s mind, like making a backup of a hard drive. This is ridiculous and not possible, but no matter how many times I’ve written memos to the powers that be, this continues to be the manner in which they request interrogation.

Data does not spool into or out of the brain like a recording.

The man in front of me is black, unbruised, breathing in ragged hitches, and muscular. From time to time he says ‘please’ in Kanuri or Hausa. He tries Igbo and Yoruba sometimes, but I am not convinced he speaks any of the languages fluently. I am uncomfortable and stay two feet away from him. I connect to the xenosphere. I first establish that he is not a sensitive. His self-image is the same as the man in the chair. That’s good — it means I will not be here all night.

There is violence in this man’s head. I see two men beating a third in what looks like a backyard. The two men alternate kicks and punches between them while their victim tries to stay upright, using his forearms to shield himself as best as can be managed. The victim is bruised, dirty, and bleeding from the mouth and nose. He does not seem afraid. If anything, he appears to be mocking his tormentors. His attackers are uniformed, dark-skinned, with berets and sunglasses designed to make them seem identical. They do not look like the Nigerian police or Army, at least not by the uniform. Looking closer, the uniforms seem homemade, like from one of the militia. They have no weapons holsters, but one has a pistol stuck in a belt at the small of his back.

Something else that is odd: I cannot smell the yard or taste the dust that the three men kick up. I have neither the taste of blood in my mouth as the victim should, nor the pain of impact on my knuckles as the perpetuators should. Instead, this image is associated with the taste of food and drink, specifically kuli-kuli and beer. I also keep getting snatches of music from a cheap keyboard.

I briefly emerge from the xenosphere and inspect the prisoner. I walk around behind him and check his bound hands. His knuckles are dark, callused. You get this from knuckle push-ups and punching a hard surface like a wall or Wooden Man in order to remove sensation from the area, to make you a better fighter. I know this because I have done it. I check this because none of the participants in the prisoner’s memory seemed trained in hand-to-hand. He is not one of them.

Did he order the beating? Where did he witness it from?

Then it hits me.

‘Oh, you clever bastard,’ I say.

I re-enter the xenosphere. The ‘memory’ is staged. The prisoner watched it in a movie on repeat and was probably eating and drinking at the same time. He probably found a lesser known Nollywood film, which accounts for the cheesy music and the poor production values. He is not a sensitive, but he knows we exist and that he might be exposed to one on arrest. What it means to me is that he does have something to hide. I probe at the edges of the memory, which is like trying to peel off the adhesive label on a packet. I need to find purchase. I fix not on the image or sound, but on the other senses. Touch, smell, taste.

‘Hello, Gryphon.’

It’s the same woman as earlier in the night while I was at the bank, playful, curious, ephemeral. The interruption breaks my concentration and I see the beating looping around and around. I search for a linked self-image but all I can find is the noise of the general xenosphere. Random mentations. Useless. I am irritated, but my training kicks in and I focus my will on the matter at hand.

The sensation associated with the beating is gentle pressure on the buttocks and food, which tells me he was seated in some living room watching the scene on a wide-screen TV or a hologram. I discover the smell of cigarette smoke. The scene shifts, wobbles, dissipates and I’m in a smoke-filled room with five other men, all of whom are intent on the screen. Nobody speaks, but they drink beer, they smoke, and they chew the snacks laid out on a tray.

I don’t like interrogations, but I’m good at them. I feel proud of myself when I solve a puzzle, and then I feel disgust. I try to think of myself as a lawyer, operating within certain parameters that do not include morality. Focus on the task.

I pull out and say to the agents, ‘I need a forensic sketch artist. Now.’

I am debriefed by my boss, Femi Alaagomeji. Videoconference, of course. Nobody in the security services would ever knowingly be in the same room with a sensitive. I know for a fact that they are not even allowed to form relationships with sensitives and are required to report the occurrence of sensitives in their families. The last time I breathed the same air as Femi was six years ago, but before that was eleven years ago, when she shoved me into S45, just before my training, when Utopicity was new and Rosewater was nascent.

Femi is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She is physically perfect in so many ways it hurts. In a sterile room, with a secure link, I videoconference with her. Today she wears burgundy lipstick. I happen to know she has a burgundy convertible Mercedes Benz. She must have driven it to work today.

‘Kaaro,’ she says.

‘Femi,’ I say.

‘Call me Mrs Alaagomeji.’

‘Femi.’

This is an old dance that we dance. She is not really irritated and I am not really impudent. We play the roles all the same.

‘Who is the prisoner, Femi?’

‘Classified, need-to-know, all that good shit. What do you have for me?’

‘Faces. Five of them. The artist did well and is running them through the system right now. She’s also looking at the location, the brand of the electronics, everything. That’s all for today. I’m tired and it’s almost time for my day job.’

‘It’s not a job. You contract. This is your job.’

‘Fine. My other job.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘I do not know. If you told me his name —’

‘No.’

‘— or what he’s done —’

‘No.’

‘Then we do it the hard way, inch by inch. I discover information, I stop, I let the artist know, we start again.’

‘So be it.’

‘Can I go home now?’

‘In a minute. How are you, Kaaro?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re lonely.’

‘I am alone, not lonely. It’s solitude, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I’m keeping up with my reading. I’m going to learn to play the oboe.’

‘What are you reading?’

‘Chomsky.’

‘All right. Are you really learning the oboe?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know why I bother asking. Go home.’

‘Goodnight, Femi.’

I’m barely able to keep my eyes open by the time the S45 car drops me at home. The night has lost the battle with the day and soon Rosewater will rise and go to work. The city wakes up in layers. Food comes first. Long haul drivers bring in crops from Oyo, Ogbomosho, Ilorin, and Abeokuta. Cassava, corn, yam flour, millet, rice from Thailand. Not a lot sourced locally anymore. These are delivered to the many categories of Bukka, the Mama Put, the Food-is-ready. Cheap, local, and essential for the unskilled workers who need a hearty carbohydrate bomb before tackling their less-than-minimum wage jobs where they go to use their biceps, triceps, and spinal columns to lift, hew, saw, join, shave, slaughter, and clean. They cook. The aroma draws out the first tier of office worker, clerks, secretaries, juniors. Over a two-hour period the middle-class professionals of Rosewater will arrive at their offices, surgeries, law chambers, accounting firms, and of course banks.

I will be joining them, but I need a shower and breakfast, perhaps strong coffee. I live in the middle floor of a three-storey in Atewo. An eight-digit code opens my flat, but there is an override key.

A series of phone messages come through as if the signal just became strong enough. I seriously consider skipping the bank, pretending to be sick and sleeping all day. I want to find out who is trying to reach me across the xenosphere. I strip and walk naked into the shower. I try that trick of using warm, then cold, then scalding hot water, but it does not refresh me. In the mirror my eyes look bloodshot and baggy like they’re from a pervert’s mug shot.

‘You look like an idiot,’ I say to my reflection. ‘You are an idiot. Your life is meaningless.’

I put on boxers and pad into the living room without getting fully dry.

‘Miles Davis, “So What,”’ I say to the sensors and the base plucks out on the speakers.

‘Phone, messages.’

I sit. I close my eyes. I listen.

My accountant wants to discuss my taxes.

The National Research Laboratory calls. They want three days of my time. They will pay. I will ignore them. I have worked for them before and I don’t want to anymore. They’re in Lagos and they want to know about sensitives. I hate going to Lagos and the NRL scientists stare at me as if they want to open my brain while I’m still alive.

A message from Aminat, her speech like musical chairs. ‘Hello, Kaaro. I know, I know, we were only going through the motions. But I find myself thinking of you and I wonder what … (laughter) Oh, God, this is so … Okay, call back. Or not. I’m not as needy as I sound.’

She has me smiling.

A television producer who has been hounding me for two years offers me money and fame if I will appear on Nigeria is Talented .

‘Hello, Gryphon.’

I first think the person has left me a message on my phone but that’s not it. I open my eyes and a shoal of mackerel, oku eko, fly past my face. Miles still plays the horn, but it sounds distant. I am in a place of shifting colours and shadows. I look down at my hands and they are gone. Instead, there are feathers.

This shit hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I am in the xenosphere-asleep and in the xenosphere. It’s easy to see how. Warm bath, sleep deprivation.

‘Gryphon.’

‘Who are you?’ I ask, against all of my training.

‘I like your plumage,’ she says. ‘Can you fly?’

‘Anybody can fly here. Who are you?’

The fish are beginning to bother me. The air has the consistency of water. I hear an underhum of voices and thoughts of others at low signal. I cannot see this woman although I hear her clearly. No self image?

‘I am an individual,’ she says. ‘I am a one.’

‘Yes, but what’s your name? Ki l’oruko e?’

‘Must I have one?’

‘Yes.’

She is silent for a time. I try to scratch my face, but I tickle myself with feathers instead. I stretch my wings and it feels better.

‘My name is Molara,’ she says.

I snap up one of the mackerels in my beak and break its back, then drop it to the floor between my forepaws. It twitches and lies still.

‘Show yourself,’ I say.

‘I don’t know how,’ said Molara.

Definitely a wild strain. I speak, echoing the words of my instructor.

‘Think of something you love, something you hate, something you fear, something disgusting or beautiful. Something you find impressive.’

Fire trucks of all sizes and descriptions stream past, none of their lights flashing. Some of them are toys. Behind each one a red masquerade runs, tiny Lilliputians for the toys, giants for the full-sized.

A butterfly flowers in front of my face. It unfolds lengthwise with a fourteen-foot wingspan. It is black and blue and its wings move in a majestic slow beat.

Then I wake, jarred out of the xenosphere at the same time by the phone. I am confused for a moment. The phone stops, then starts again.

‘Yes?’ I say.

‘You’re meant to be here,’ says Bola. ‘You sound hung-over. Are you hung-over?’

‘Oh, shit.’

I am monstrously late.

My grooming is sloppy, but better than the metalheads’ so I’m fine. The customers surround the bank like ants feeding on a child’s dropped lollypop. The day after the Opening is always extra busy because people want to see their doctors and get laboratory tests to confirm their healing. The Rosewater medical community is not very robust and comes alive only at this time of year. One would think they would be out of practice.

The firewall is up without me. They are reading pages of Tolstoy. I sit in the break room and rub ketoconazole cream on my exposed skin to keep me out of the xenosphere. It’s the busiest banking day of the year and I do not want to fatigue myself further. I drink horrendous instant coffee by the cupful to keep myself awake, a benched striker.

INTERLUDE: MISSION ONE

Lagos, 2060

It is unbearably hot, but still I wait. I feel rivulets of sweat dripping down my back, in between my butt cheeks. I can just about breathe, but the close, oxygen poor air threatens to make me black out. There are moth balls here waxing aromatic in my nose and mind, whispering fact and fiction about my wife. I can barely keep still. The clothes in the closet caress my back. Down around my feet there are shoes crowding, jostling for space. A dangling belt tinkles with my movements, made loud by the silence. My left hand rests against the warm wood of the door, my right by my side, weighed down by the knife.

I wait.

Any moment now.

I hear a door slam from elsewhere in the house. I hear the beep as the door autolocks, and giggling that makes me see red. Literally, red flashes across my eyes in the darkness, like a surge of blood, just for a second. I can feel my heart driving the blood through my body, demanding that I move. I wait.

There are bumps and mistakes as two people wind their way through my house, through our house. The door to the room swings open. I imagine them standing there kissing. I hear the sucking sound of their lips. My fist tightens on the handle of the blade.

‘Stop,’ says my wife, but she is laughing.

‘Okay. No means no,’ says the man, mock seriousness.

Her perfume reaches me now. I hear the adulterous rustle of her clothes falling to the carpet.

‘Really?’ says my wife.

Now the blood sings in my ears. My head feels larger and my mouth is completely dry. I feel my scrotum constrict.

Lydia, Lydia, Lydia.

I do not know if I am thinking this or if her lover is repeating her name over, but her first gasp of pleasure is my cue.

I break out of the closet. The first few seconds are free because they do not hear me in their passion. I am at the bed. She is naked, supine, legs apart. He is between those legs, his hand buried in her sex, his neck beginning to turn.

I cut him first, side of the neck, surgical. The blood spurts, but I ignore it and shove him by the right arm. Lydia screams. Her eyes are rather comical circles, the whites larger than I have ever seen. For spite I drive the knife into her left eye, withdraw it, then stab her throat. I look at the man who is holding his neck and wetting the carpet with his blood. His shirt is soaked. His movements lack direction and he will die soon. I turn back to Lydia who is gurgling now.

I take my time to —

I vomit.

I fall to all fours and spew yellow-green slime. ‘Oh, fuck. He did it,’ I say.

Ohfuckohfuckohfuck.

‘Are you sure?’ asks Femi. ‘No hair, no DNA, no physical evidence.’

I cough. ‘Holy fucking shit, Femi, if I say he did it, he did it. He did it, okay? I fucking did it.’

‘Kaaro, calm down.’ She places a hand on my back, but I shrug it off.

‘I did it. I bought a Gene-grub and let it feed on me, then I let it loose in the room after I killed them both. An elegant drone hack removed traces of me from surveillance cameras. I paid the staff of the hotel for their blindness. I drowned them in a river of foreign currency. They will go to their deathbeds denying that they ever set eyes on me.’

I dry heave.

‘Kaaro, you mean him, right?’

Oh fuck, the revulsion. Oh, fuck. Ori mi. Help! Lydia! Lydia!

Why the fuck does it feel like … Why am I guilty?

‘Help me,’ I say. ‘Help me.’

I crawl into a corner. I cannot stop shaking; I cannot stop seeing my arm rise and fall, the wide eyes, the gurgling …

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‘Over-identification,’ says the doctor. I forget his name, I do not like him.

Three months since the assignment. I am sequestered, back in from the cold, as they say. They stick me in a mental joint, for field agents who go over the edge, and I most definitely went over the edge.

He continues. ‘You identified too strongly with your subject. Ego boundaries blurred and you lost the integrity of your self. You thought you were him.’

‘I know that here,’ I say, pointing to my head, ‘but not in my heart.’

He laughs. ‘That’s an improvement over when you first arrived. If it’s in your head, your heart will follow.’

I am not so sure. I am not so sure who I am. I mean, I know I am Kaaro, and I work for S45 and I was trained by Professor Ileri and Rosewater is my home and … but … but I remember how Lydia sighs after fucking just before she demands that I get her a glass of water. I remember sliding the ring on her finger the day we get married. The biodome is a mixture of cerulean and vanilla in the background of our wedding photos. I remember her cooking. I remember opening a sauce pan to see the stew bubbling, gurgling, like the froth from her neck when I …

I feel the tear roll down my cheek. ‘Doc, I miss her,’ I say. ‘If I never met her, why do I miss her so much? Why do I feel guilty?’

‘Maybe you feel guilty because there is someone you, Kaaro, have an unconscious desire to kill. The murder of Lydia fulfilled that desire. Down under the surface of our mind lie the demons and gremlins of our base instincts, struggling for expression.’ He checks the screen in front of him and asks, ‘Have you been taking the meds?’

No. ‘Yes.’ No. They make me impotent.

‘This is the third antidepressant we’ve tried. I’ve never seen such a strong reaction. Ileri thinks it’s because your ability is more acute than any other.’

‘My wife is dead. I should be sad, right?’ I ask.

‘Kaaro, you have never been married. You never even met Lydia. You spent time in her homicidal husband’s mind. The experience was so intense that you can’t disconnect. The pills aren’t working. I’d like to try something else.’

He slides over consent forms for shock treatment.

I walk out of the building.

I really want a cigarette, even though I have not smoked for a long time. I just feel like I should be smoking.

Nine months. I have lost enough time to have a baby.

A drone descends to read my identity, then flies off.

I get a phone call. It’s Femi, so I ignore it. Great service to your country blah blah put the man in jail for life blah blah sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice, blah blah.

I cannot remember everything that happened, gaps in my memory. A part of me thinks perhaps there is a reason for the gaps and that I really do not want to know.

There’s a sorrow in me, though. I do not know why, but I feel it.

Whatever they pay me is not enough.

I look for a taxi.

Rosewater by Tade Thompson is available now from Apex Book Company and most fine vendors

Tade Thompson lives and works in the south of England. His first novel Making Wolf won the 2016 Kitschies Golden Tentacle award for best debut novel. He has written a number of short stories including “Budo” at Escape Pod. His horror novella Gnaw will be released in December from Solaris Books. Rosewater is available now from Apex Book Company.