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 | 220 words

“Words from the Editor-in-Chief” Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sizemore
“Uncontainable” Copyright © 2016 by Helen Stubbs
“The Love it Bears Fair Maidens” Copyright © 2016 by K.T. Bryski
“Red Christmas” Copyright © 2016 by Lavie Tidhar
“I Remember the Future” Copyright © 2008 by Michael A. Burstein
“Interview with Author Helen Stubbs” Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Johnson
“Interview with Cover Artist Billy Nuñez” Copyright © 2016 by Russell Dickerson
“By the Cover” Copyright © 2016 by Lesley Conner
“Remembering the Future Past: An Interview with Author Michael A. Burstein and Filmmaker Klayton Stainer” Copyright © 2016 by Eileen Maksym
“The Familiar” Copyright © 2016 by Donna Ison
“How to Know Your House is Haunted and What to Do” Copyright © 2016 by M. Brett Gaffney

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 92

by Apex Editors | 47 words

Next month in Apex Magazine we have original fiction from James Beamon, Iori Kusano, Lia Swope Mitchell, J.J. Litke, plus a new story by Ursula Vernon that you help unlock by supporting our subscription drive! Also, from the drive we have a reprint of Mike Allen’s novelette “The Quiltmaker.”

Review and Follow Apex Magazine

by Apex Editors | 91 words

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Interview with Author E. Catherine Tobler

Pointy edges can be blades, teeth, and the surprisingly dark part of a story.

by Andrea Johnson | 1982 words

Do you remember the kid’s series “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark?” I fondly remember taking those skinny volumes to summer camp, and reading them until I knew the stories by heart. Many of you have already realized the best part of that “scary” series is reading the stories to any elementary school aged child and knowing you are exposing them to something that is as scary as it is safe.

Helen Stubbs’s story “Uncontainable” felt to me like an incredibly grown up version of those elementary school stories. Why the comparison? Well, within a few paragraphs of the opening of “Uncontainable” you know something horrible is going to happen, you just don’t know what. As the story continues and hidden depths reveal themselves, you’ll suddenly be asking yourself which is more horrifying—the way the family treats their daughter, or the monster? And the best part? The thing that most reminds me of that Scary Stories series? Every time I reread “Uncontainable,” I wanted to immediately read it again, because at the end of the story I felt safe . I was creeped out, I was squirming in my seat, but I’d found a safe place to explore being scared of so many things. Being scared of being misunderstood, being scared of a physical creature who can kill me, being scared of not knowing how to communicate what I need. Other than the physical creature that can kill you, I think we all have anxieties about being misunderstood.

There is also the much larger, and ultimately more important dimension this story discusses about being an autistic child in a family that has effectively given up on you. Stubbs’s historically accurate portrayal of how families cared for (or didn’t care for) their disabled children is a much larger discussion, one which I hope readers will explore in the comments of the story or this interview.

Helen was kind enough to let me let me pick her brain on all things behind the scenes in “Uncontainable,” the cathartic experience of writing pointy stabbity edges, her writing process, and her newest projects. Helen Stubbs lives in Gold Coast, Australia, where she is heavily involved with the Galactic Chat podcast and the Aussie SF Snapshot among her projects. Her dark fiction has appeared in multiple magazines and anthologies including Mirror Dance , Next , Subtropical Suspense , Midnight Echo , and Tales from the Bell Club . She was awarded the Ditmar Award for best new talent, and her short story “The Perforation” won the AussieCon 4 short story competition. Her recent short story, “Casino Five,” was recently released on Amazon. You can follow Helen online at her blog helenstubbs.wordpress.com , and follow her on twitter where she is @superleni.

APEX MAGAZINE: The story involves Mrs. Morrison and her two children, the family’s maid, a boarder, and Good Wife Henny. The story gets creepier as it goes along, pulling the reader into Rochelle’s secret knowledge. What made you decide to tell this story from the boarder’s point of view? When you’re writing a story, how do you decide which character can best tell the story?

HELEN STUBBS: Let’s call the boarder “Alex,” although they don’t have a name in the story. Working from Alex’s point of view allows the story to unfold in traditional narrative shape, and for the reader to discover things along with them, and share their confusion, doubt, and shock. I think Rochelle knows too much for the story to work from her point of view. I did try to write it that way, though I wasn’t sure what her inner monologue would sound like. Part of the story’s tension is created through Rochelle’s usual difficulty communicating contrasted with her occasional eloquence.

I’d say Rochelle is the main character, while Alex is like a sidekick. The plot couldn’t unfold as it does without Alex, but Rochelle is really the key character. I would usually tell the story from the point of view of the main character, but there are advantages to having it slightly removed, especially when there’s a mystery.

AM: Rochelle is dismissed because her family has no idea how to deal with her autistic tendencies, but she’s highly observant and very protective of her brother. What inspired this story, and how did Rochelle develop as you were working on the story?

HS: The interesting thing is that Rochelle doesn’t try to communicate with her family, she only talks to Alex. I get the feeling that her family has given up on her, whereas Alex is new to the household and has more of an open mind. I think this sometimes happens in families … we tire of each other and underestimate each other, while greater expectations make room for unexpected performance.

In the story I wanted to bring out the strengths of a character with special needs, such as resilience and endurance. I also wanted to turn the spotlight on a character with a disability and show her weaknesses and her strengths. I think there’s a tendency to either look away from disability or look on with fascination, or with judgement and aversion, and I wanted to create a space where that was subverted. Alex isn’t judgmental and isn’t afraid to help, which is great, I think.

Lots of things inspired “Uncontainable.”One thing was that people with autism do love and empathize. (Or at least, every person I’ve met with autism does.) The Discovery and Education of a Savage Man (1802) also inspired me. It’s a true account by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard about the discovery and education of Victor, a boy who had grown up in the wild and was adopted by the scientist and author who initiated research and theory around education for people with special needs.

My son has ASD, too, and for a few years he was uncontainable, in the sense of escaping from preschool, school, and our locked-down home.

In early drafts of the story, Rochelle didn’t have a name, which is horribly dehumanizing, when I read over it. Finding the right name for her was an important leap for the story, and it is the right name, which reflects her strength, not her silence. I felt like I knew and loved her from early on.

AM: Why isn’t the boarder more shocked at the family’s treatment of Rochelle?

HS: Alex is fairly accepting of the Morrison family’s neglect because locking up and abusing people with disabilities has been common historically. Currently people with disabilities have a higher rate of abuse and are sometimes murdered because of their disabilities, or a carer’s inability to cope. As the writer I’m not condoning these tragedies, I’m spotlighting them and, ideally, starting conversations aimed toward providing people with disabilities and their carers with the assistance they need to close opportunity gaps and live enjoyable lives.

Care can be complicated, though. If you’re restraining someone from hurting themselves, are you helping them? If you force someone to wear clothes when they don’t want to, are you helping them? At a broader level, how should the community help people with disabilities and their carers? Alex helps by being there for Rochelle when her family is failing her.

AM: Will her experience with Good Wife Henny be a turning point for Rochelle? Will her family ever know what she’s done for her brother?

HS: I think her friendship with Alex is the main turning point for Rochelle, because now she has a friend, someone who is there for her and who listens to her. They can work together and help each other. Friends are important to everyone, and people with disabilities need them just as much as others.

I’m not sure if the rest of the family will find out about Rochelle’s talent, but Alfred will have a mutually protective bond with his sister. Seeing I’ve mentioned talent , can I clarify that I don’t want the story interpreted as suggesting all people with a special need also have a gift. Rochelle has a gift because this is fiction, and it is in addition to her disability, not because of it.

AM: In your author bio on your website, you use the phrase “stories that are dark with pointy edges.” How do you define pointy edges? What edges are you sharpening in your fiction, and what pointy bits have you found in the fiction of other writers?

HS: Pointy edges can be blades, teeth, and the surprisingly dark part of a story. Eviscerations are common in my work—just a little though. I don’t like the realities of dissection or surgery, but I rather love to write them, for example, the young husband chopped into tiny living parcels and carved into a living violin in “Sayuri’s Revenge,” and the poor alien abductee taken apart and then reassembled, in “Surgeon Scalpelfingers.” I find it cathartic to excise demons this way.

Other dark and sharp work that I love includes Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, Debris by Jo Anderton, Kusheil’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey, and The Visitor by Sheri Tepper.

AM: Tell us a little about your creative process. About how long does it take you to write a short story? Are there ideas or themes you enjoy returning to in your fictional worlds?

HS: I write whenever I can snatch the time, often in the morning before anyone else awakens. My creative process varies, but usually my first drafts are quick. Usually I put them away for two weeks, or send them to a friend for a critique. After some time has passed, or the critique has come back, I’ll go over the piece several times, or several hundred times, until it looks right or I can’t face reading it any longer. I love feedback from editors, and if I’m lucky enough to get some I’ll tweak it according to their advice, unless it doesn’t feel right.

Themes that pull me back to them are defending those you love, being different, the contradictions of motherhood, nature (especially forests), human society, and connections between life, death, and dreams.

AM: You’ve been very involved with Aussie SF Snapshot 2016. What can you tell us about this project? How did you get involved with it?

HS: The Aussie Snapshot is a series of interviews spanning a two-week period. It’s hectic and fun. About twenty interviewers interview as many Australian SF writers, publishers, podcasters, and other SF-related people as we can. We’ve done about 200 interviews in each of the last two Snapshots. Here’s a link to my interview and the main page . The Snapshot has been done every few years since 2007, so it provides some historical and social insight to the growth of Aussie SF.

A friend invited me to join the team during the last Snapshot, possibly because I’d been doing Galactic Chat podcasts. Aussie SF has a great community. Although we’re scattered around a big country we keep in touch online and hang out at cons as often as possible.

AM: What’s next for you? Any new or recent projects you can tell us about?

HS: I recently attended Conflux in Canberra where I fan-girled on a panel about Labyrinth ! That was fun, talking about how we all loved David Bowie from too young an age, and Sara’s fabulous independence and assertiveness, and the powerful messages about denying people power over you. A couple of us saw parallels between the Goblin King, Jareth, and Edward from Twilight , like he was a precursor to those predatory narratives. We found it disturbing that in Labyrinth , Sara refuses Jareth, whereas Bella enters a relationship with Edward.

Most impressively, Thoraiya Dyer made and wore a Fire Gang dancer’s head, with detachable eyes.

About my recent work, my most recent publication was a stand-alone short story on Amazon called Casino Five . I’m currently working on an edgy unicorn series, working title, The Unikorniverse . If you’d like to know more, say ‘hi’ to me on Twitter. I’m @superleni .

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 Billy Nuñez

by Russell Dickerson | 906 words

This month’s Apex Magazine cover artist is Billy Nuñez, a versatile artist working with many styles and designs. From science fiction and portraiture, through comics and digital art, Nuñez brings forth fascinating characters and worlds.

APEX MAGAZINE: Your cover art for December’s Apex Magazine is one in a series of images called “Future Face,” and the video within the gallery on your site shows the process of creating one of the paintings. How much of the mechanics behind the face do you have worked out ahead of time, versus creating them on the fly?

BILLY NUÑEZ: It’s mostly created on the fly but some parts I think of ahead of time because of how important it is to the structure. I usually look at the insides like it’s the skull so certain parts like the eye and the mouth area need to be a certain way to make sense. The portraits are very realistic so certain things about the interior need to be realistic too. So having a space where the eyeballs fit makes sense, so does having realistic teeth. The rest of the interior I make it up, focusing on making it look cool rather than realism since that’s what you can’t see. These are the rules that I have set up for this series, which I can then play with later additions to the series.

AM: Many of our cover artists post either videos or images of their creations in progress, both for the public and to learn about their own processes. Does recording a piece as it is being created influence the work at all, or create any good or bad self-conscious feelings as you work?

BN: It does make me more self-conscious about certain things. There’s things that look simple enough to do that might take way longer than I expected and sometimes I might want to cut out some of that from the video out of feeling embarrassed, even if it’s something no one would notice or care about. Things like this are both good and bad in that it makes me step up my game while painting, but sometimes might make me too tense when I should loosen up. These videos give me the same feeling as when I’ve painted in public with people walking by. Those self-conscious feelings are just something you have to deal with as with any social interactions in life.

AM: On your website, you have a series called “People,” and another called “Girls,” with different concepts of painting styles and realism versus exaggerated bodies. It reminds me of artists like Honore Daumier, known for both his realism and caricature-related styles. Do those ideas ever conflict when you are coming up with a piece, or is the idea fairly sound in the process?

BN: The people series is mainly general portrait work and the “Girls” are mainly female “pin-ups,” which are more erotic in theme. The portraits I have now are mostly realistic because they are all using photo reference and I wanted to keep the look of the photos as they were. The “Girls” are mostly exaggerated and stylized because most of those are done from my imagination. That’s just the way I have them so far but I’m not opposed to having realistic or stylized pieces in either series.

AM: Your website features the “Monstas in the Basement” video that you directed and animated. How does that experience affect your more recent creations, as far as your processes, ideas, or approach?

BN: Making that video was an interesting process because I’ve never filmed anything like that where I had to direct performers, set up lighting, etc. Most of my work is just me on my own, sometimes taking direction from a client. The video hasn’t affected too much of my new work but I do have videos that I plan on doing where that video has prepared me for. It was a great learning process that will help me in future work.

AM: The “Gēn” gallery on your website features a fascinating look at patterns and depth. How is the approach to one of these pieces different than a looser, more general painting style?

BN: I like to experiment with all the possibilities of digital illustration and this series is one of those times where I figure something out that I want to explore with many more pieces, which is how it becomes a series. In the “Gen” I wanted to make repeat patterns that could work well as prints for fabrics. The drawing process is pretty loose and could be anything I want really. The difference between this series and a general painting style is that the piece doesn’t come together until I scan the drawings and start copying and pasting it around in different ways until I’m happy with the results. Unlike most paintings where I can see the finished product in my head, I don’t know what these pieces will look like while I’m drawing the elements that will be duplicated later. Once I start copying and pasting, it’s fun seeing what comes out of my drawings that I wasn’t even imagining. The computer becomes almost like a collaborator in the piece.

AM: Thank you, Billy, for letting us have a look at your artistic process. See more of Billy Nuñez’s art on his website at billynunez.com .

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 .

By the Cover

This is a woman who will walk into war and cut down her foes, but she does it with style.

by Lesley Conner | 1132 words

They say you shouldn’t judge a book (or in this case, a magazine) by its cover, but sometimes … I mean, just every once in while … don’t you really want to?

One of my tasks as managing editor is finding cover art for each issue. Today I want to share some of that art with you. If you judge the quality of Apex Magazine based on these covers … well, I’m okay with that.

These are some amazing covers!

First, let’s look at the cover for issue 90, November 2016.

By the wonderful Ania Tomicka , this piece is called “No Time.” The layered look of the different portions is very interesting to me. I love how soft and innocent the girl appears. The paper lady with her talon like fingers covering the girl’s mouth is a great juxtaposition. And what’s up those little lurking imps? Overall it is beautiful but threatening at the same time. With a simple color palette and an uncluttered background, it would be very easy to miss all the layers in this piece, which is one of the reasons I think it works so well.

Next let’s take a look at issue 84, May 2016. The artwork is “Unraveling Fire II boy” by Robert Carter .

Can we talk about these colors for a moment? That gorgeous mint green against the flash of oranges and yellows of the flames. The striking blue of those piercing eyes against the pinkish bloodshot red. The palor of the man’s skin … This is a man who has been through some shit. It’s eating him. He’s literally burning up from the inside and coming apart at the seams.

Compare that to the cover of issue 88, September 2016.

The grace and beauty of Mélanie Delon ’s “Red Poison” steals my breath away every time I look at it. The woman is a warrior. Of that there is no doubt—the way she holds her body, the set of her face, that sword!—but that doesn’t mean she is hardened. Look at the impeccable crisp white color of her dress, the bow tied just so at her waist, the softness of the fabric. This is a woman who will walk into war and cut down her foes, but she does it with style. What broke the man from issue 84’s cover wouldn’t even phase the woman on issue 88.

Next, I’d like us all to take a moment with the cover for issue 87.

Is it me or does the woman featured in Marcela Bolivar ’s “Ipocondrie” look as if she has just breathed in her first breath of air. You can almost see her gasp. The relief of breaking free, of being alive! There so much movement in this piece: the falling petals, the woman’s swinging hair, the splash of water in the vase, the storm brewing in the distance. Looking at it gives you a feeling that if you watch long enough, it will come alive and all those moving objects will continue their journey.

Speaking of motion, take a look at the cover of issue 83, April 2016.

“Hurricane Woman” by Sarah Zar is a little different style than most of the covers I choose for Apex Magazine. The speculative element is more subtle, less spectacular unreality and more the hidden storm inside of us all. The woman’s face is impassive. Her clothing nearly matches the background, as if she spends her life trying to blend in, not wanting to call attention to herself. But the moment of the piece is one in which she’s revealing what is inside of her. She pulls apart the fabric of her dress (of herself?) and inside a storm is brewing. One that spills out of her. One that could drown us all. And I’d swear there’s a glint in her eyes as she stares back at the viewer that is daring us to judge her, to judge the fact that she couldn’t hold back the emotions roiling within her any longer.

Okay, one more. I began this post thinking I’d only talk about four pieces, but I just had to squeeze in a couple more.

Issue 86, July 2016. This is a cover that brings together an awe-inspiring color palette with an amazing sense of movement.

There are so many things that I like about “The Fire” by Sunny Ray . The way that portions of the piece are out of focus to bring the viewer’s eyes the focal point. The stance of the boy—he isn’t focused on the viewer, he’s busy, he has things to do, worlds to move. So he stands with his back to us, arm raised, magic seeming to move through him. The color of the fire popping in the background against the rich blues and purples of the sky. All of these come together to form an image that portrays untamed power. The boy looks so young and the fire is raging before him. As a viewer, you have to wonder if he can hold it back. Or is he trying to? Is he a savior or a destroyer? And no matter what his intention, the viewer is left wondering if he is capable of pulling it off.

I’m in the process of lining up artwork for 2017 right now. So far we have pieces by Aaron Nakahara , Adrian Borda , and Caroline Jamhour selected. I’m not going to ruin the surprise by showing you those pieces now, but I can assure you they are just as stellar as those from 2016. Head over to the artists’ DeviantArt pages and see if you can guess which artwork I selected for Apex Magazine.

If you haven’t been able to tell from my uncontrollable gushing about the cover art for Apex Magazine, I truly love the artwork we use. We have been fortunate enough to be able to work with some incredibly talented artists from around the world. This is amazing to me, the ability to use my computer to do a quick search and discover something beautiful that was created half a world away. Then, if I’m lucky, I get to share it with you.

This essay was originally published on Books, Bones & Buffy as part of our subscription drive promotions.

Lesley Conner is a writer/editor, managing editor of Apex Publications and Apex Magazine , and a Girl Scout leader. When she isn’t handling her editorial or Girl Scout leader responsibilities, she’s researching fascinating historical figures, rare demons, and new ways to dispose of bodies, interweaving the three into strange and horrifying tales. Her short fiction can be found in Mountain Dead , Dark Tales of Terror , A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre , as well as other places. Her first novel The Weight of Chains was published by Sinister Grin Press in September, 2015. Best of Apex Magazine: Volume 1 marks her debut experience in anthology editing. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two daughters, and is currently working on a new novel. To find out all her secrets, you can follow her on Twitter at @LesleyConner .

Tropes as Erasers: A Transgender Perspective

by Keffy R.M. Kehrli | 5422 words

TW: This essay includes frank discussion of anti-trans tropes, rapes, murders, and hate crimes. Additionally, if you Google “Tropes about Transgender people,” you are likely to end up on a WordPress site named “TransgenderTropes101.” This is a hate site and is best avoided.

I grew up without any transgender representation of any depth or value. To be fair, I also grew up with very little cisgender queer representation of any depth or value, either. There were oblique references, but typically not in the media that I was given to consume as a child. The references in adult media were filtered through daytime talk shows or the Rush Limbaugh-listening parents of friends. Or jokes. Or that one extremely pitiful-to-my-memory gay guy in As Good As It Gets . (My own parents are considerably more liberal, but left LGBTQ discussions for, “well, that’s a thing that happens to other people’s children.”)

Until I was 20 and wandered away from my college campus to meet the locals who practically lived in an independent coffee shop a mile or so away, my experiences of trans people were limited to:

• Jokes and/or whispers I overheard about how so-and-so got a sex change. (Always trans women.)

• Maury Povich episodes. (Also always trans women.)

“But, Keffy,” I can hear some of you say, having correctly done the math and knowing I’m not that old, “what about Boys Don’t Cry ? Wasn’t that about a trans man?”

Well, yes. I didn’t watch that because the film didn’t sound interesting to me, just depressing. I had no idea that it was about a trans man because it was described to me as, “A movie about a girl who pretends to be a boy and gets murdered.” Since Brandon Teena was played by Hilary Swank, that seemed like a likely description. I didn’t know that Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man until after I had come out.

In any case, it had not even occurred to me that it was possible to be trans male—transgender people were exclusively trans feminine in my experience —until I was in a group of comic artists discussing gender, and one of them said, “Yeah, but you identify as female, right?”

Two things happened. First, I stammered out some “well, I don’t know” answer because I had honestly never considered that I got a say in the matter of my own gender up until that point. And, second, after it sank in over a few days, I felt like I had crawled out of bed one morning to discover that I had no face. You see, I knew how to function as a gender defying young woman. I’d carved out an existence within the versions of womanhood opened up by feminism in which I felt it my duty to fight for any masculinity I wanted. I had models, though sometimes flawed, of women who had gone before me. Women who flipped the finger to the universe, picked up their beakers or strapped on their flight goggles and did what they needed to do.

I had no models for what a trans man was, except the vague unease that in order to be myself, I was going to have to betray feminism.

Thankfully, I found friends who were trans male, and in the grand tradition of being queer in a hostile world, they were my role models, flawed as they were. I’ve been continuously surprised since the mid oughts, however, that the stereotype common within LGBTQ circles is that all trans men transitioned as children and are the most beloved in university campus queer communities. This was not my experience. When I visited the LGBTQ group at my university, I sat and talked to a couple of lesbians who could not wait to get rid of me. I didn’t go back.

Feeling newly lost as I grew into my 20s had made representation of trans people outside the typical expectations a major issue to me. I was late in understanding myself because there was no room for me in the world. Trans people seemed to exist entirely within stereotypes and tropes: only trans women exist, trans women are jokes, trans women are liars, trans men aren’t real, trans men all pass as cisgender men and have since they were children.

Tropes about groups of people (trans people, women, people of color, etc) can affect the way others see us. They can also affect the way we see ourselves. Or, in my case, if we see ourselves. If the only models we have for the world are these tropes and stereotypes and we don’t fit those, then what are we?

Transition isn’t magic: simple, one-step transition as a trope.

I was partly disappointed and partly relieved when I started to research transition and found out that it’s an open-ended process rather than an event. Among the uneducated, transition is often discussed as a “sex change surgery.” Transition can seem sudden if you’re a cisgender person who isn’t within the circle of trusted friends and family who hear about the impending transition ahead of time. There have been moments when I wished it was that simple, that it was a single surgery and you were just done, forever. Never needing to give myself another testosterone injection would be awesome.

The reality of transition is that it’s a process that has different goals, outcomes, and time-frames depending on the person undergoing it. Physical transition of one’s body is not an overnight event and is not desired by every trans person. When physical transition is required, the medical procedures chosen depend on the goals of the trans person and, unfortunately, their financial or medical means.

In fiction, however, the nuance is often lost. Gender Swap, Magical Sex Changes, replacement bodies, and the like have been a part of modern science fiction for decades. The magical Gender Swap frequently plays out in which someone magically wakes up in the “wrong” body. Magical Sex Changes involve a trans character being gifted the “right” body (meaning, indistinguishable from a cisgender body). Science fiction takes on these tropes usually by postulate replacement bodies, virtual reality existences, or “perfected” gender confirmation surgeries. There are similar tropes (although broken down differently than I do here) listed on the website TV Tropes as Easy Sex Change and Gender Bender.

Although the magical transition can be used to examine gender dysphoria, these are often stories written by and for cisgender people. The Gender Swap story is also typically about a cisgender character who has suddenly been shoved into a body with secondary sex characteristics of the “opposite” gender. The ensuing story is typically extremely binary and gender essentialist, with that little dash of fantasy or science fiction to make it interesting. Genitalia are typically obsessed over, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

This is also a trope that is often played for humorous purposes. For some reason, people don’t seem to be able to get over the apparent hilarity of gender play, much as they still laugh at fart jokes. The joke here, of course, is something along the lines of cis men joking that if they suddenly woke up in a female body, they’d never stop playing with their breasts! Or cis women joking that if they woke up with a dick for a day, they’d write their names in the snow and jerk off for ten hours straight. Or, whatever.

This trope generally bears little resemblance to reality for most trans people and erases the real difficulties and decisions that we end up facing when we decide to transition, to whichever degree we decide to do so. Very few of us are able to pull off a rapid, let alone instantaneous, transition from one gender to another without a stage in which we don’t “pass” as cis. Some of us never “pass” as cisgender no matter what we do. Not all of us want to. The instant shift from male to female (or female to male) in which nobody ever questions the gender of the person in question on either side of the magical transition feels extremely unlike the reality that myself and many of my trans or non-binary friends face. I’m not arguing here that every story featuring a transgender character needs to discuss that character’s transition in detail. It’s the trope in which these problems are actively waved away by the author that bothers me.

The magical/instant transition trope turns transgender people into a rhetorical device to examine the gender hang-ups of the cisgender author or readers. In this way, it takes our lived experiences, erases them from the most elementary framework of our lives (transition), and replaces those experiences with an exclusionary thought experiment or joke.

As a side-note, there are some pieces of science fiction and fantasy that deal with “hermaphrodite” characters, but those characters are usually aliens or other magical races. Regardless of whether the hermaphroditic characters are human or not, their lives and experiences seem to bear little to no resemblance to the lives of actual intersex people. The depiction of this character often focuses in lurid detail on their genitalia, typically with an overly simplified elementary school health class understanding of the biology involved in sex and gender. Although these characters are often non-human races, I have run across occasional depictions of human hermaphrodites, and these often postulate a being with Perfectly Functional Cis-Normative versions of “both” sets of genitalia. In reality, “hermaphrodites” are fictional as the term is no longer accepted for use when describing people with these conditions (ISNA). I’ve read a few depictions of intersex characters that I thought were interesting, for example, the protagonists in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 are well-written otherwise, and their lives don’t revolve around their genders.

That said, I get extremely uncomfortable when I read about characters described as “hermaphrodites,” especially if they’re intended to be humans because I expect the depiction to be less than ideal.

Trans People Don’t Need Your Incorrect, Fictional Warnings. Seriously.

When not imagining a world in which transition is painless and instant, tropes about transition focus on warning people away. Often the focus of these warnings is on transition’s permanence, which is not always true depending on how one decides to transition. In the case of transgender children, the effects of transition are typically not permanent at all. Pre-pubescent transgender children, for example, will typically transition by telling others of their new name and pronouns and possibly changing their physical appearance via their chosen clothing and perhaps a haircut. That’s hardly permanent. Older children are sometimes placed on puberty blockers so that when they begin to take hormones (typically starting between the ages of 16 and 18), they will only have to endure one puberty. The blockers are reversible. Nobody is rushing out and giving permanent surgery to young children.

While it is true that some of the effects of transition are permanent, trans people are not jumping into medical interventions without consideration of the effects. Trans people are typically well educated regarding our options, so much so that attending new doctors is disappointing because we often end up educating our doctors rather than vice versa. In the United States, the coverage for transgender treatments, especially surgeries, is often dependent on individual insurance companies. Worse, as I discovered a few years ago when researching options for top surgery, coverage is often dependent on the particular plan that your employer is offering. I was in the interesting position of working for a trans-friendly employer, with a plan from a company that covered transgender treatments in general, but the particular plan that I was offered through my employer did not have coverage. That has since changed, but unfortunately only did so a month before I got laid off.

Very recently—as in, while I was writing this essay—an episode of the Power Puff Girls reboot was released in which the tropes of instant, permanent, ignorant transition are played for body horror and an intensely ill-considered statement regarding trans issues.

The episode features a pony named Donny who wants to be a unicorn. Of course, The Professor has been working on a transmogrification ray that will do just that thing. The show depicts Donny ignoring a massive pile of potential side effects, and, of course, being punished for his desire to change his body by experiencing every horrible side effect that he blithely ignored (Jitterbug Jive).

The trope that transition will happen immediately and be completely permanent in every way was one of the things used to try and scare me away from making any changes to my body. My initial discussions with medical professionals about taking hormones essentially involved those professionals trying to talk me out of taking them. This will be permanent. You might not like all the changes. There are side effects when testosterone is taken by women. Etc. You will regret it. What if you regret it? Letting someone know the effects of the treatment is one thing, but trying to pressure us into not transitioning is something else entirely.

I still remember being told that when I started taking testosterone, it would turn me into a hulking, hairy, masculine rage monster. I did grow more body hair, that’s normal. And I did have moments when my emotions were overwhelming. But … as a transgender person who also suffers from depression and who has dealt with his share of PMS prior to taking testosterone, it wasn’t anything that unusual.

The trope, however, is that testosterone is a horrific poison that is singularly responsible for all the evils in the world. Bullshit. Men don’t act badly because of testosterone alone. Hormones aren’t the only thing that controls our behavior. Testosterone is not the cause of toxic masculinity. Trans men don’t take a shot of testosterone and then immediately go out to punch women in the street.

The irony, of course, is the number of people who would rail against gender essentialism in almost any other case who immediately became concerned that testosterone would send me into a massive “‘roid rage.” Starting hormone treatments can be a time of massive emotional upheaval for trans people, but the scaremongering is vastly overstated. I’m no angrier now than I was before I started testosterone.

This trope also showed up in a book I read a few years ago. White Horse by Alex Adams is about a magical plague wiping out most of humanity. The book takes place in the post-apocalyptic wasteland left behind. Besides the frustration that I felt in being served up yet another apocalypse story in which women are constantly dealing with rape and rape threats, the book had one of the most transphobic character depictions that I have read in a book. The villain, a terrible, violent man who had captured and wanted to rape the protagonist, was revealed to have been a woman before the magical transformation. The shift to a body that contained testosterone turned her (now him) into a horrifying monster who was willing to rape and murder everyone in revenge for having lost her (his) female body. The book somehow managed to hit both the anti-trans masculine trans trope of testosterone rage and the anti-trans feminine trope of the evil trans woman who is planning to rape and murder cis women to make up for her lack of a female body. Nice trick, that.

In retrospect, whether it was intentional or not, I’m rather impressed that the author managed to turn the “testosterone makes people violent” and “trans people are dangerous” tropes into a book that is wildly offensive against both trans men and trans women at the same time.

The Scary Trans Person Trope: We’re Not Monsters, Seriously.

What’s truly pernicious about anti-trans tropes is that they are often reiterated and kept alive by people who ought to know better. Several years ago, I was sitting in a room with a very good friend of mine when their boyfriend came into the room. “Hey, have you heard about the Black Widow?”

What followed was the regurgitation of an urban legend in which a large, black trans woman seeks out cisgender men to lure in with her femininity, and then rapes, kills, and/or otherwise assaults them. We let him finish, listening with a sense of growing horror, and then explained in no uncertain terms that he needed to never, ever, ever repeat that story again.

Ever.

The “scary trans woman” tends to be more of a societal trope rather than one in science fiction or fantasy (although, as I write this, I’m certain that someone, somewhere, is writing this trope into a story right now). This imaginary monster of a trans woman is overlaid on real trans women and creates a boogeyman that erases the very real dangers that trans women face. Worse, this imaginary threat puts trans women in even more danger.

Trans women, especially trans women of color, are the LGBTQ people most likely to be targeted in a hate crime. When we discuss people who have been murdered for being queer, most of these are trans women of color. Yet, because of the societal notion that the fragile masculinity of cis men must be protected at all costs from these women, the danger that trans women are in is upheld, protected, and justified.

We see this in the use (and success) of the “trans panic defense” when trans women are murdered. In this case, the murder of a woman whose transgender existence was a figurative assault on her murderer’s masculinity. This was recently used in the defense of Jessica Laude’s murderer, a U.S. Marine who killed her after discovering that she was a trans woman (Brydum).

Islan Nettles, a young black trans woman, was murdered in 2013 by a man who beat her to death in the street because he felt that his masculinity had been threatened by Islan’s gender. The prevalence of the “trans panic” defense with respect to murdered trans women is so common that feelings tended toward relief when Nettles’s murderer was charged with manslaughter (instead of murder) because at least he wouldn’t be set free. (McKinley).

We also see this complete disregard given to the reasons why a trans woman being assaulted in the street would fight to defend herself. Look at the story of CeCe McDonald, who was sent to prison for two years because she killed a man in self-defense after he and his friends attacked her in the street (Erdely). The stats, the stories, these all led to the conclusion that a trans woman attacked by a man can expect to be a “Transgender woman murdered” headline (National LGBTQ Task Force). As of 2015, the number of trans women murdered seems to be increasing yearly (Michaels).

The trope is that trans women are dangerous predators. The reality is that trans women are simply women trying to get by in a world that is determined to hate them.

As an aside, I felt torn writing this section of the essay. As a white, financially surviving trans man, the pain of trans women of color is decidedly not mine to write about. On the other hand, ignoring the very real harm done to trans women of color would be just another erasure. Please seek out the voices of trans women of color. Monica Roberts at Transgriot (Roberts) writes about these issues often.

It’s All About Control

Most of the tropes that have a negative impact on trans people are based in the ways in which a cissexist world tries to control our behavior and lives. If physical barriers to transition, body horror scares, and violence against us aren’t enough to dissuade us, the next option is accusations of selfishness.

Cis people are used to viewing our lives through our own perspective. To many, we are, if not laughable or dangerous, simply incomprehensible. Unable to truly understand what a trans person is going through, it’s easier for some people to only think about their own feelings. In this case, the idea that a trans person is doing what is necessary to live their own lives is taken as, if not openly hostile to the cis people in their life, selfish and inconsiderate. Pay attention next time you listen to an argument about whether or not a trans person should have been treated better by their family and community after coming out. Most likely, you will hear cisgender people trying to reframe the situation around their own feelings. Yes, they’ll say, but how do you think I feel, finding out that this person was “really” a woman/man.

Trans people who have transitioned are portrayed as having made sacrifices that they shouldn’t have (or that weren’t theirs to make) in order to succeed. Frequently, this is also a method of blaming trans people for the bigotry that they face.

According to this trope, trans people transition without any thought or concern for the other people in our lives. This is, in fact, the direct opposite of my experience and that of many other trans people. So many of the people who have transitioned later in life (40+ years) considered transition much earlier in their lives but denied themselves out of concern for the world around them. Trans people often spend much of our lives trying to determine when and how we should tell our friends and family. That was one of the biggest hurdles for me. Changing my name was one thing, telling my parents that I had done so (and why) was much harder.

The trope that trans people are selfish about the decisions we make with respect to our own bodies and outwardly facing identities are based on a cisgender discomfort. We are saying that, having considered how the people around us will feel, we have still decided that transition is the best option.

The trope also ignores the fact that for many of us, transition (especially for those of us who are undergoing physical transition due to body dysphoria) is essential and life-saving.

“She’s Still Dead.”

The tragically dying queer trope also applies to trans people. In many cases, the tragic death of the trans person doesn’t even happen during the course of the story, and the depiction is limited to a dead sex worker found at the beginning of a detective story. This isn’t the only way that trans people die in fiction. Sometimes we die during the course of the story, occasionally to forward the cause of the cisgender heroes.

I do sometimes wonder if one of the reasons that trans people die so often in fiction is that our lives are so devalued. It’s as if, when writing about a trans character, in order to get an emotional response out of readers, authors feel that they need to push the feelings buttons harder. What better way to wring an emotion out of a reader than by killing the character?

Death is also an easy punishment or way of encouraging sorrow. A death can be divorced from the specific pains that marginalized people experience in their lives. You have to exercise empathy to understand a disappointment or punishment that would not unduly punish you. It doesn’t take much more empathy beyond, “Wow, I don’t want to be dead” to feel sad about someone having died.

Pay attention next time you read a book with a trans character (who is very rarely the protagonist anyway). Typically, this character will suffer, constantly, and probably die at the end. Or in the middle. Or even near the beginning.

I feel like I should have more to say about this trope, but it’s also one of the tropes that has been discussed the most online. Think about a story that has a transgender character in it. Does she (or he, even more rarely) die before the end? Probably.

I was once on a panel that discussed LGBTQ characters in fiction, and we discussed the Dead Lesbian trope. Someone in the audience brought up Tara’s death in Buffy , asking, “Well, but what about a character who is well developed and who dies because it’s the right thing for the story?”

The answer I gave then was, “She’s still dead.”

This doesn’t mean that no trans or other queer character may ever die in fiction. It does mean that creators should be aware that this trope exists and that no matter how well done the death is, there will always be people who are tired of seeing these characters die. The problem isn’t that a single, individual character has died. Characters die in fiction all the time. The problem is that every one of these characters dies. A similar issue came up recently with the death of Abbie on Sleepy Hollow . Abbie was not a queer or trans character, but cisgender black women in media face some of the same treatments. In this case, the strong black woman character was called upon to sacrifice herself to save her white, male, co-lead. The problem was not that Abbie died—it was that Abbie died to forward the stories of the white characters and highlighted the problematic treatment of characters of color in Sleepy Hollow (Butler).

An example that comes to mind is Wanda from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, although I hesitate to bring her up because she is a contentious case. When I read the comic in 2004, she was the first transgender character I had read about in any science fiction or fantasy story who was dealt with in a sympathetic manner. While I was sad that her womanhood was denied in life and upset that she died, I read her story as, “It’s dangerous to tell trans women that they aren’t women because doing so literally kills them.” This is a truth.

I’ve ended up talking about Wanda with many trans people. I’ve met trans women for whom Wanda was an important character, and who love her. I’ve also met trans people who say the same thing that I did on that panel regarding Tara, “Yes, but she’s still dead.”

This is true. Finding value in a work does not mean that it is no longer a part of a trope. It just means that we have either seen past a trope, accepted the trope in that case, seen that the trope is used for something greater, or, in the case of the stories in this book, decided to invert the trope.

The problem is not specifically that Wanda died. The problem is that Wanda died … and so did nearly every other trans person in science fiction and fantasy stories.

By the way, don’t be surprised if trans people disagree about the quality of any one depiction of a trans character. We are a very scattered group of people who are only loosely called a “community,” and we come at these stories from extremely different backgrounds. It is for this reason that I also tend to use Wanda as an example of a problematic depiction. She’s problematic because while she has meant a lot to some trans people, she is seen as harmful by others. How many of the problems come from Gaiman’s writing, and how many come from the notion of womanhood that he was writing about and critiquing? Etc.

In any case, I am hesitant to write or publish stories in which trans people die tragically at the end, even though I, personally, tend to like tragedies.

On a similar note, it wasn’t until I started editing reprints for my magazine GlitterShip that I realized just how many LGBTQ stories involve characters who have dead or dying lovers.

Pitfalls in Flipping Tropes

One of the last terms that I want to hear regarding a work that contains transgender characters is “edgy.” This isn’t that I don’t like fiction that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, or that seeks to shove the status quo off a cliff. It’s that, so often, the types of things that get called edgy are status quo plus. Typically, these works show the seedy underbelly of cities, lives, worlds, but do so as a type of voyeurism. The intent is not to humanize people who are marginalized in our current status quo, but to be entertained watching them suffer.

What I expect from an “edgy” work featuring a trans character is that the character will be a trans woman, and probably a sex worker, and will somehow resemble none of the trans women or sex workers (or sex workers who are trans women) that I have met. Most likely she will suffer and be shown to be ridiculous, over the top, rude, and selfish. And then, she’ll die so that the protagonists have a death to react to.

It’s almost impossible to find media that avoids all of the anti-transgender tropes. Even when I’m not watching a comedy with raunchy humor, I always expect now that there will be a joke that’s anti-trans somewhere in the story. The exception, of course, is in fiction written by my fellow transgender creators. In those cases, I might find things that make me uncomfortable (like I said, we don’t all agree about everything!), but even those are at least thought through. What really makes most of the anti-trans tropes, stereotypes, and jokes burn is how casual and unnecessary they are.

It would be wonderful to be able to watch an episode of a new television series, or a new movie without feeling like I need to brace myself for the inevitable anti-trans joke. “Escapist” fiction gets a bad rap sometimes, but I feel like this is mostly due to the number of people for whom most of this fiction is escapist because they aren’t the ones getting fed to the wolves for a cheap laugh. Fewer awful depictions of trans people, and more sensitive depictions—especially those that are #OwnVoices (Brinkley), would, if nothing else, reduce the stress that we feel as a result of being perpetually marginalized, even within genres that claim to welcome the unusual. (Yes, science fiction and fantasy, I’m looking at you.)

So, I ask for two things of the people reading this essay. First, seek out fiction by trans authors. We’ve been writing about our lives and experiences for decades and frequently ended up ignored. Thankfully, this is starting to shift, especially in short fiction. Some authors to start with are Nino Cipri, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Everett Maroon, and Pat Schmatz. You can also check out the sources listed below by John Hansen, Bogi Takács, and A.C. Wise for a longer list. (Bogi also writes #OwnVoices transgender and non-binary science fiction.) Second, if you’re cis and planning to write or talk about trans people, consider these tropes. Are you supporting the way we are treated in the status quo? Are you accepting these tropes and stereotypes without consideration? Are you flipping them? Awareness is the first step toward creating a meaningful, respectful depiction of trans people, but awareness alone isn’t enough.

This essay originally appeared in Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling edited by Monica Valentinelli and Jaym Gates out soon through Apex Book Company.

Works Cited

Adams, Alex. White Horse. New York: Emily Bester/Atria Books. 2012. Print.

As Good As It Gets. Dir. James L. Brooks. Perf. Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear. TriStar Pictures, 1997. VHS.

Boys Don’t Cry. Dir. Kimberly Peirce. Perf. Hilary Swank, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard. Fox Searchlight. 1999. Film.

Brinkley, Nicole. “#OwnVoices takes over Twitter.” YA Interrobang http://www.yainterrobang.com/ownvoices/ >.

Brydum, Sunnivie. “U.S. Marine Claims ‘Trans Panic’ in Murder of Trans Filipina Jennifer

Laude.” The Advocate. http://www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/08/24/us-marine-claims-trans-panic-murder-trans-filipina-jennifer-laude >.

Butler, Bethonie. “After a shocking death on ‘Sleepy Hollow’ fans are questioning how the show treats characters of color.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/04/12/after-a-shocking-death-on-sleepy-hollow-fans-are-questioning-how-the-show-treats-characters-of-color/ >.

Dalton, Deron. “The 22 trans women murdered in 2015.” The Daily Dot. http://www.dailydot.com/politics/trans-women-of-color-murdered/ >.

Dawes, Dorian. “A Joke in the PowerPuff Girls Reboot is a Sucker Punch to Trans Women.”

Bitch Media. https://bitchmedia.org/article/joke-powerpuff-girls-reboot-suckerpunch-trans-women >.

“Easy Sex Change.” TV Tropes. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EasySexChange >.

Erdely, Sabrina Rubin. “The Transgender Crucible.” Rolling Stone http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-transgender-crucible-20140730 >.

Gaiman, Neil (w), McManus, Shawn, Colleen Doran, Bryan Talbot (p), Giordano, Dick, George Pratt, Stan Woch (i), McKean, Dave, Daniel Vozzo (a). The Sandman: A Game of You . Ed. Karen Berger, Alisa Kwitney. New York: DC Comics. 1993. Trade.

“Gender Bender” TV Tropes. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenderBender >.

Hansen, John. “Top 10 books by transgender authors featuring trans characters.” The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/feb/01/top-10-books-transgender-authors-trans-characters >.

“Is a person who is intersex a hermaphrodite?” Intersex Society of North America. http://www.isna.org/faq/hermaphrodite >.

http://jitterbugjive.tumblr.com/post/142485553459/jitterbugjive-jitterbugjive-jitterbugjive >.

McKinley Jr., James C. “Manslaughter Charges in Beating Death of Transgender Woman in 2013.” The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/nyregion/manslaughter-charges-in-beating-death-of-transgender-woman-in-2013.html >.

Michaels, Samantha. “More Transgender People Have Been Killed in 2015 Than Any Other Year on Record.” Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/11/more-transgender-people-have-been-murdered-2015-any-other-year-record >.

Roberts, Monica. Transgriot. Transgriot n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2016. http://transgriot.blogspot.com/ .

“Seeing Red.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Sixth Season. Writ. Steven S. DeKnight.

Dir. Michael Gershman. 20th Century Fox, 2002. DVD. “Stop Trans Murders.” National LGBTQ Task Force. http://www.thetaskforce.org/stop-trans-murders/ >.

https://twitter.com/bogiperson/status/715595554839875584 >.

Takács, Bogi. “Trans SFF by Trans Authors - #ownvoices.” Goodreads . Goodreads n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2016. .

TransWomen of Color Collective. http://www.twocc.us/ >.

“What is intersex?” Intersex Society of North America. http://www.isna.org/faq/what_is_intersex >.

Wise, A. C. “Tag Archives: non-binary authors.” A.C. Wise.net. http://www.acwise.net/?tag=non-binary-authors >.

K.T. Bryski is a Canadian author and podcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Apex (among others), and her audio dramas Six Stories, Told at Night and Coxwood History Fun Park are available wherever fine podcasts are found. She is currently at work on her next novel. K.T. is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing; she also has a mild caffeine addiction. Visit her at www.ktbryski.com .

Remember the Future Past: An Interview with Author Michael A. Burstein and Filmmaker Klayton Stainer

Pointy edges can be blades, teeth, and the surprisingly dark part of a story.

by Eileen Maksym | 3778 words

When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of the Back to the Future movies. I was seven when the first one came out in July of 1985, and my dad, himself a film aficionado, took my younger sister and me to see it in the theaters. The first movie that my sister and I saw in the theater on our own was Back to the Future II, in 1989. And while my personal favorite is Back to the Future III ( mainly due to the adorable romance between Doc Brown and Clara) it’s that second movie that has gotten a lot of attention lately. You may remember that it’s the one where Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to the future. October 26 th , 2015, to be exact. Which means “The Future” was a little over a year ago. As that date approached, many marveled at how different the actual future was from the shiny, manic future of flying cars and self-drying clothes. Somehow they managed to have hoverboards that didn’t explode … and yet they also communicated by fax instead of email.

Abraham Beard, the protagonist of Michael A. Burstein’s Nebula-nominated short story “I Remember the Future,” is also living in a future that is different from the one that he expected. As a peer of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clark, Beard wrote stories of a future that saw humanity traveling to the stars. When we meet him, he’s an old man, and the future he had spent his life creating hasn’t come true. The American manned space program has stalled, and instead of interstellar travel and colonies on Mars we have the Internet and blogging. To compound his frustration, he has come to believe that his stories hadn’t been his own ideas, but rather messages from the future, a future that now doesn’t seem to exist.

Beard’s devotion to the future of the past, both in creating it initially and in mourning its loss, has damaged his relationship with his only child, Emma. As we watch his painful interaction with her, we are given flashes of the future that Abraham created through snippets of his novels. We’re brought to wonder what place this man has in a world that seems to have left him and his future behind. By the end of the story we have an answer, and (no spoilers!) it’s not what you might expect.

In 2014, Australian filmmaker Klayton Stainer adapted Burstein’s story into a short film starring Reg Gorman and Tiffany Lyndall-Knight as Abraham Beard and his daughter Emma. In addition to being very faithful to the original story, the film is a love letter to classic science fiction, with the snippets of Abraham’s novels rendered into beautiful scenes with sweeping, majestic music that masterfully evoke a sense of wonder and awe. Those scenes run a strong counterpoint to the quiet emotional intensity of the scenes between Gorman and Lyndall-Knight. The audience is invited to exist, like Abraham, in these dual worlds of the present and what, according to the science fiction of Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, and Beard, the present should have been.

I had the privilege of interviewing both Michael A. Burstein and Klayton Stainer about the story and the film it inspired.

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Michael A. Burstein

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APEX MAGAZINE: Writers are often asked where we get our ideas, and I found it really funny that Abraham has the answer down pat: he’s getting direct communication from the future! Do you have communication with the future?

MICHAEL A. BURSTEIN: I do not! I wish I had communication with the future. The way “I Remember the Future” happened was that Apex had agreed to publish a collection of all my stories that had been nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula. For a collection, you want to make sure to provide readers with something new, so we provided two new stories. One was another story in the Broken Symmetry series, and then I needed a title for the book, and I was going to have a story to go with the title. So I did a contest on LiveJournal. I opened it up and said, what’s a good title for a collection of my stories? It was a high school friend of mine, Andrew Mark Green, who came up with the phrase “I Remember the Future.”

So here’s this title. What is this story going to be about? And that’s how I started developing. Okay, maybe there is a guy who is remembering the future. How does that happen? Then I started going to my themes of how will we be remembered, science fiction writer, all of these pieces started kind of being put into place.

AM: “I Remember the Future” resonates with a lot of people. Why do you think that is?

MAB: You know, I thought it would resonate a lot with the people who like older science fiction. I wrote a story about a guy who lived through all that. The little vignettes from his novels that I put in there were supposed to be representative of what science fiction was like when he was writing. The story did not get nominated for a Hugo, but it did get nominated for a Nebula, so it obviously resonated with science fiction writers who were members of SFWA at the time. And I can see the appeal it has for filmmakers. You have this framework story where you’ve got the writer, you’ve got his grown daughter, they’re just in a house. But then you have all these little pieces drawn from these novels. It would give a filmmaker a chance to say, see, here’s what I can do. I can bring to life this scene of archaeologists discovering an ancient library, I can bring to life this scene of people about to board a spaceship. Then, in the case of Klayton, I can do it relatively inexpensively. I mean, the guy was a student. This was his college thesis, I think.

AM: He did a really good job with it.

MAB: I was blown away. I thought it was beautifully done. It was incredibly true to what I was trying to say, and he put in extra layers. If you look at the website, all these throwaway characters in these vignettes are given back story on who they are. I don’t want to say anything that’s a spoiler for people, but one of the things that I thought was a very interesting creative choice was how the actress who plays the captain of the spaceship was the same actress who plays his daughter. I thought it really showed something in Abraham’s world. He can’t relate to his real daughter. And that’s the tragedy. He’s only able to relate to the daughter in the stories he thought he was creating.

AM: He doesn’t seem to have a very good view of his daughter.

MAB: I want both Abraham and Emma to be sympathetic; that said, there’s definitely a barrier between them. I wrote this story the year between losing my mom and my daughters being born, so I didn’t really have a comparison to be on Abraham’s side of parenthood. That said, it wasn’t that hard to envision this as somebody who maybe didn’t ever know how to deal with having a child. Remember, he’s an early 20 th century writer. He’s the kind of guy who probably thought, when he married Emma’s mother, that she takes care of the kids and I will earn a living. But of course, being a freelance writer, he was living entirely in his house. Emma, as a little girl, is constantly looking for attention from her father, and isn’t getting it. He’s really focused on his writing, and at the same time, perhaps he also sees it as this is how he makes a living to support his daughter. She’s not going to appreciate that at the age of four, the age of seven, it’s not until she's much older she might understand it, but even so, I think she’s come to a point in her life where any gesture he would make, even if it was the right one, is too little too late.

AM: Do you feel that Abraham is an unreliable narrator?

MAB: You know, that’s a very good question. I do not feel he is unreliable in the sense that the events of the story are true. I don’t think he’s going crazy, I think he really is in touch with the future. That said, I think he’s got his own perspective on the events of his life. I think if you were to sit down with him and ask him, why don’t you think you have a good relationship with your daughter, he would put more of the blame on her than on himself. He was doing all the right things, how come she has turned away from him? He isn’t necessarily able to step out and view it from her perspective, although he probably thinks he is.

AM: Yeah, he comes off as a little self-centered.

MAB: Yeah, he is self-centered. You know, as people get older, sometimes they become more set in their ways. They think, well, why can’t the world just be the way it was when I was younger? And I think that’s sort of the way he is. And there’s an irony here, a deliberate irony. Science fiction writers can sometimes be the most calcified, set-in-their-ways people imaginable. Not all of them, but you have the stories about writers who will still use their typewriter, and only their typewriter, into their later years. Abe wants to see the future be the way he envisioned it. And when it turns out to be very different, he wants to reject everyone and go into his own future.

AM: Science fiction in general has a low success rate when it comes to predicting the future. Do you think that affects the worth of those stories at all?

MAB: If the goal of science fiction were to accurately predict the future, it would not be science fiction, it would be futurism. At the same time, sometimes things get predicted in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect. George Orwell, he predicted that the government would be looking over all of us. But nobody predicted that it was going to be mostly corporations, and nobody predicted we would hand over this information voluntarily and willingly, for the sake of certain conveniences. You have to keep in mind that it’s very easy for science fiction, or anyone, to predict certain changes in technology. But the trick is predicting the social consequences.

AM: The protagonists of the stories within the story seem to reflect Abraham. Do you feel Abraham reflects you in any way?

MAB: I’m going to let you in on a little secret that nobody knows yet. One of my good friends from high school is a writer/publisher named Charles Ardai. You may know him as the husband of Naomi Novik. Back when we were in high school, Charles wrote a coming-of-age novel. He did what you do, you take a lot of your friends and put them in the story. My middle name is Abraham, and at one point in high school, I grew a really big beard. So he named that character Abraham Beard, to be basically a version of me. And it was interesting, because he did capture aspects of me in that character. Later on, Charles occasionally would use the name Beard in a story to refer to some science fiction writer. So I used that character name that Charles came up with.

Now, that said, I’d like to think that I’m a nicer person than the character is. I think I can have a better relationship with my kids. But I definitely strongly identify with a lot of what he says. Look, the fact is, in 2011 we ended the American crewed space program. Every astronaut that we put on the International Space Station is going up in a Soyuz. Why aren’t we putting investment into trying to establish a permanent base on the moon? Why aren’t we trying to get people on Mars? Abraham, these are his concerns, and as a result he tends to dismiss technology. He sees people looking too much inward, rather than looking outward. I don’t reject that, but I do agree we should be doing more to explore. And a big part of that obsession is that every living creature that we know about is living on one planet. And that’s not a sustainable situation. I like the idea that something the equivalent to self-consciousness, intelligence, the human race, will continue to exist, and that is going to require getting off the planet.

AM: There’s one point in Fire and Ice where Sandra says, not only are we going to save ourselves, but more importantly, we’re going to continue remembering everybody who came before us.

MAB: Yeah. And this is one of my obsessions. She’s talking about how this universe is coming to an end, but they’re going to make sure that people remember, they bring it forward. It’s a classic concept, that if there are still people around who remember you, then in a way you’re not gone. And that’s sort of what I think about in that story. And the irony is that Emma, who is around, who will remember him, isn’t going to remember him in a positive way.

AM: Science fiction is literally Abraham’s method of escape from reality and particularly from mortality. Do you think that science fiction in general is useful as an escape from real life and from death?

MAB: I think for him it’s more of the idea of leaving the legacy. Again, it’s part of my own obsessions. And I think they fall into his mind as well, especially given that, in this particular story, he is at the end of his life. He is trying to figure out what kind of legacy he’s going to be able to leave for the future. Of course, someone who is writing mainstream fiction might be thinking about their legacy, about wanting to make sure what they write is remembered in the future, but the interesting thing about writing science fiction is you’re writing about that very future that you’re hoping you will be remembered in. And that does create a problem. Are these novels going to be remembered by people because they are so dated? The writer and critic James Nichol has a website called “Young People Read Old Science Fiction.” He got a bunch of younger people to read Asimov’s “Nightfall,” which twice was voted by the SFWA as the best science fiction story ever. And a lot of them just can’t get into it. They see flaws, they see issues. I love Asimov’s work, but I can see some of those flaws and issues, too. How is this going to be remembered?

§

Klayton Stainer

§

APEX MAGAZINE: How did you first encounter “I Remember the Future,” and what attracted you to it?

KLAYTON STAINER: My family and I head out together to our summer cottage every year after Christmas. I received a book called The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF as a gift from my parents. Michael A. Burstein’s “I Remember the Future” featured in this book, and when I read the story it just grabbed me. I was immediately drawn to the characters and I felt myself storyboarding Michael’s brilliant writing—in my head—it was so clear almost as if I had already seen the completed film. That’s when I knew I had to make contact with the author.

One thing that really attracted me to the story was the different ‘worlds’ which the main character, Abe, disappeared to in his mind. I was intrigued at the possibility of essentially putting seven different short films into one longer piece. It of course also opened up the possibility to play with these different scenes each in their own way. Each ‘world’ has its own aesthetic characteristics—every character has its own background story, look, feel, and colour.

AM: How would you describe Abraham? What is the essence of him you want to get across? And what did you look for in an actor when casting the part?

KS: Casting someone for the role was a challenging thing. The actor needed to be someone we could all relate to in a way, someone you would feel sympathetic toward, but also not sorry for. I always had a vision of what the character should look and sound like. When I met Reg Gorman, suddenly all the pages of the story made sense. Reg is also a very strong actor, his expressions could tell the audience a story without speaking. This was essential for Abe’s character as he drifted in and out of reality.

Abe’s dreams and hopes very much represent the everyday person. Everybody has a dream they wish to come true. We wanted to get across most of all how Abe dedicated and lived his life through writing about a future he dreamed of.

AM: How about Emma?

KS: Emma is a character who had to fend for herself in an emotional way since she was young. Her father was lost in his writing and didn’t tend to the reality of her life. Of course, she grew up and I suppose loosened herself from his fictional world he was living in. Her relationship with her dad is estranged and I think her only salvation is his death.

I looked for an actor who could portray Emma’s assertive personality. And we were very lucky to have Tiffany Lyndall-Knight play the character. She really brought a sense of longing for a dad, along with the backstory of never being able to truly experience what it would be like to have one.

AM: The same actress plays both Emma, Abraham’s daughter, and Sandra, one of his characters. What inspired that choice? What is the connection between these two women?

KS: We decided to have the same actor play Sandra McAllister, to show that although Abe was an absent father, his world (which was his work) did in fact revolve around his daughter. She was the inspiration to his stories. Sandra was one of his favourite characters in his books and most certainly a leading lady. By having Tiffany play both Emma and Sandra, we created a link between the two characters that represents Emma in the way Abe has always seen her: strong, independent, and a woman who he believed could lead a revolution.

AM: Why do you think Abraham has such a strained relationship with his daughter?

KS: I think Abe never really got to know his daughter. We gave Emma the backstory of a young girl who saw her dad as a hero—writing all of these fictional stories. One day she grew up and realised that she could not live in a fictional world. She feels as though her dad’s whole life passed him by and I think the fact that her two sons cannot have a ‘real’ relationship with their grandfather places strain on Emma and Abe’s relationship. Abe has a second chance to be to Zachary and Kenneth what he never was to her. But of course, as we know, Abe never changed his ways.

AM: Do you feel that Abraham is an unreliable narrator?

KS: I don’t think Abe is an unreliable narrator. In fact I think that he is the only character who can truly explain to the audience what is going on in any given moment. When we meet Abe he is living two lives, so to speak. He may be losing his thoughts and ideas in reality, but in a fictional world anything is possible and the idea of sickness or in his case dementia can be erased from any character by simply removing a page from the story.

AM: You can tell a lot about Abraham by looking at his surroundings. What do you want the audience to notice?

KS: His surroundings are essentially his mind. A million different things and ideas scattered on top of each other. We aimed to get the idea across of someone who does not care about ‘mess’. Abe truly believed that there is something bigger and better—a vast universe of technology and at some point the human race would have to leave earth behind. So when this day would come he would not think twice about the state in which he leaves his house.

AM: Are the heroes in Abraham’s mental flashbacks different versions of him?

KS: We wanted to aim toward Emma being the inspiration for all of Abe’s stories and in almost every flashback we find a strong female or mysterious character. The idea of having Abe place his daughter on a pedestal in this way eases the audiences’ mind about Abe being a better father-figure than what Emma realises. So in many ways we wanted Abe to be a father to his stories, a ‘creator of worlds’. This is portrayed in the conversation he has with Sandra in the final scene.

AM: We see Abraham reading The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein. What’s the significance of that?

KS: This is a personal input from me. The Number of the Beast is one of my dad’s favourite science fiction books. And since I received The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards from my parents as a Christmas gift, which gave me the idea to make this film in the first place, this was my way of saying ‘thanks’. It is also a little Easter egg for scifi lovers as the story is about dimensions and fictional universes.

AM: I won’t spoil the ending for our readers, but I will say that you manage to maintain ambiguity by not showing us what Emma sees. Do you think what happens to Abraham, as he perceives it, is real?

KS: I’d like to think that what Abe perceives is real, otherwise what is the point? As an audience member I would like to see the character move on to something bigger and better—or moreover for his dreams to come true. But then again is that the reality of life? It certainly is not the way Emma could fathom the end of her father. So perhaps the story ends with Emma being faced with reality.

AM: There’s some irony to Abraham’s story winding up on the internet, in e-books, and now in the form of a movie that can also be found and watched on the internet. What would Abraham think of all this?

KS: I think it would not have been “good enough” for him. He would have been more satisfied if his story could be the first film screened in space—which is still be a possibility …

Eileen Maksym studied philosophy at Yale and theology at Boston College, and now uses both to write science fiction. Currently she is an academic nomad, following her astrophysicist husband around the world, two kids in tow. When not writing or kid wrangling, Eileen is a hopeless fangirl. She can be found on Twitter (@eileenmaksym) squeeing over her favorite shows, most of which involve famous detectives, dashing time travelers, and creatures that are never, ever referred to as zombies.

How to Know If Your House Is Haunted and What to Do

by M. Brett Gaffney | 377 words

I.

Do doors open by themselves? Drawers? Closets? Is it autumn, and are the leaves

spiraling outside in tiny twisters? Remember, wind can often move heavy objects

like wooden doors or picture frames or empty caskets left in the parlor.

If it’s not the wind, leave the door unlocked. Get acquainted with your hallways. Your shelves.

Your hidden spaces like unwashed pockets,

denim stained with dead skin and secrets.

And if you must lock the door, find an old doorknob, something rusted

with keys like bone.

II.

Do you hear voices at night? Do they speak to you? If they are pleasant, inviting, then reply

but have something interesting to say. Ghosts, like people, can be bored of pillow talk.

If the voices sound angry, screams like cracked linoleum or the upfront and close, get out !

beastly and bristled,

then play music. But do not sing along. For weeping, light a candle, preferably unscented.

Light two if the moaning persists like the hum of a lopsided ceiling fan.

If the clock reads 3:00 am,

those digital numbers like blood vines,

close your eyes, your mouth. Breathe like the rabbit.

The conversation has grown teeth.

III.

Having bad dreams since you moved in? Do they involve inhumanly tall men

lips of chiseled stone?

Or perhaps old women braiding your hair into moth eggs? Moth wings. Moths.

For all nightmares plant a small garden by your windowsill, grow verbena,

invite butterflies.

Do you die in your dreams? Your limbs strewn across the street like pick-up sticks,

or maybe a bullet to the back, warm lead like a lover

whirling through the dance-floor of your body,

scattering the ladies in red, the men gathered round the bar to watch, their scotch bright and dry.

If this happens, ask the ghosts if they know your name. Silence, go back to sleep.

But if an answer threads itself through the static thrum of early morning, whispers

like an unraveled ball of yarn, lamb soft and full of knots

—prepare to make plans.

M. Brett Gaffney, originally from Houston, Texas, holds an MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University and is the art editor for Gingerbread House . Her poems have appeared in Exit 7, Penduline, Permafrost, Devilfish Review, Still: the Journal, Fruita Pulp, museum of americana, BlazeVOX , and Zone 3 among others. Her chapbook, Feeding the Dead , is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press. She currently works as a library associate in northern Kentucky and lives in Cincinnati with her partner and their dog, Ava.

The Familiar

I sing. She dances. With our Devil.

by Donna Ison | 212 words

Choosing a feline form, gray tabby.

Demon spirit seeps into sinew,

Commandeering the warm flesh.

Now, I may move among you …

Sucking the creamy breath,

From the infant’s fresh-formed lungs,

Grinning as the baby boy gasps his last.

Marking the maiden, the virgin, the bride,

Powerful piss shriveling her womb,

Rendering her infertile.

Scratching cryptic symbols,

On the door of a cozy cottage,

Thus welcoming the pox.

Hissing Sulphur secrets,

Into the husband’s sleeping ear,

Your wifey has a lover. Your brother.

Purring round the ankles of a little lass,

Luring her into the dense wood,

Leaving her lost in the gloom.

Sinking fangs into the fat, feathered throat,

Of the family’s lone hen,

Father must steal or children will starve.

Yowling to the Cheshire Moon,

While my mistress writhes naked,

I sing. She dances. With our Devil.

All in a night’s work,

For a familiar.

Donna Ison is an author, playwright, blogger, performance poet, and the former editor of skirt! Magazine . She is currently putting the finishing touches on her third novel, The Queen of Hawthorn Holler and organizing the all-female performance troupe, Broad Brigade. Donna also writes historical drama for museums nationwide, produces socially-conscious theatre, and was a founder of The Sisters Provocateur. She recently edited and published Out: An Anthology of LGBTQIA Kentucky and won the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning’s flash fiction contest with her story, “To Dream of Tigers.” To learn more, visit her Bourbonista Blog at www.donnaison.com .

The Love It Bears Fair Maidens

by K.T. Bryski | 2091 words

2,200 Words

The hunt begins as it always does: with quarry, bait, and hunter.

§

Let’s see if we’ve got this right.

A young maiden settles herself in a sun-kissed glade. Sixteen, eighteen, never much older than twenty. Clover cushions her feet and gold-drop daffodils bob in the breeze. Maybe there’s a stream burbling close by. There usually is.

Then—suddenly, silently—the creature steps from between two birch trees. The noble unicorn slips into our glade. Dark eyes blink; its dainty hooves don’t even bend the grass. White fur shines like spun moonlight. It’s the pony we all wanted growing up.

Except for the horn, of course. Long and spiralling, tapered to a sharp point. Maybe it’s black, maybe white, or maybe even gold. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the horn is very long, very thick, and very hard.

Think about that for a moment.

So the unicorn steps towards our maiden, not looking anywhere else. Only at her. Like it’s devouring her with its gaze. And our maiden, she doesn’t even move. She barely even breathes. She sits there, frozen, her back ramrod straight as the wild animal draws closer and closer. Until its hot breath drags over her cheek, and its stench scours her nostrils. You know that reek. Dirt and musk and shit.

Sorry.

Excrement.

Our maiden still doesn’t move. The unicorn bends its knees, preparing to put its giant head in the maiden’s lap. You know, with the long, thick, hard thing a couple inches from her crotch.

Can we forgive the maiden for inhaling sharply and bolting through the woods, cold with terror?

§

See, here’s the thing.

Unicorns are horrific creatures.

Look at them. We’ve got this wild beast that’s mostly a horse, only with an ice pick on its head. Trust me: horses’ hooves and teeth are plenty sharp. They don’t need anything else.

Except a unicorn’s not only a horse. It’s a patchwork mess of the least attractive quadrupeds. Cloven hooves, like a goat—and Satan, incidentally, but the symbolism there would take a while to work through—and often the goat’s beard, as well. Boar tail. Elephant feet. Stag heads. Sometimes they’re actually just rhinoceroses.

I’ve never seen that in any tapestry. The gentle spring glade, delicate young maiden, and a rhinoceros barreling towards her. You’d run too, I bet.

§

Back to our maiden. She races through the trees. A shoe falls off, snagged on a root, but she doesn’t break stride. She didn’t know she could run that fast, but when you’re desperate and scared, you can do a lot you never realized.

Hooves pound the earth behind her. Our maiden gasps for breath, glances over one shoulder. In the forest’s treacherous light, she keeps losing sight of her pursuer. The unicorn is white in a dark forest, but that doesn’t make it any less sly. It cloaks itself in the shadows, hoping to catch the maiden unawares.

Sometimes, the sun glints off the horn. That’s her only warning. Once, it nearly catches her, but it ruins its chances by letting out a frustrated grunt. Without thinking, our maiden drops to her knees, rolling along stones and mud. The unicorn rushes past her, catches its horn in the trunk of a tree.

While it fights to free itself, stamping and screaming, our maiden scrambles to her feet. Crying with exhaustion, she gathers herself and runs once again.

The hunt isn’t over.

§

That’s an old motif, by the way. If you can’t get a maiden to lure the unicorn, the next best thing is to stand in front of a tree. You goad the thing into charging at you. If you time things right, you can leap clear at the last moment, and let the unicorn drive its horn into the trunk. Then it’s a simple matter of stabbing the unicorn to death, or cutting off its horn and running like hell.

Almost sounds like bull-baiting, doesn’t it? The unicorn’s nostrils flare the same way. Its muscles bulge, eyes go red—they’ve got tempers. Even Shakespeare said so:

“… wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury.”

Timon of Athens. It’s no Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s got to count for something, right?

§

Pride and wrath. A unicorn denied is a unicorn enraged. This isn’t the way the story goes, after all. Young maidens should be delighted when a unicorn approaches them. They should be honoured. They should take the unicorn’s attention as proof that they’re worth something.

Our maiden is a mess of snot and tears. Sticks and leaves poke from her hair. Her dress has been ripped, and she tugs it lower with a flush of shame. Her other shoe’s gone too. She’s not going back to get it, but now rocks slice her feet. Every step cuts a little deeper.

And that’s just her feet. The maiden’s legs ache so much, it’s like she’s been beaten. She wants to stop, needs to stop. She’s too tired to fight any longer.

But she knows what will happen.

Wildness. Pride. Wrath.

The woods are thinning out; she glimpses open fields through the trees. Wide, clear meadows: nowhere for the unicorn to hide. Across the field and down the valley, her village waits. It’s nothing much: a handful of thatched-roof cottages that look like gingerbread from a distance.

But the village is home, and home is meant to be safe. Even for quarry.

§

In the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry, the last panel shows the unicorn tied to a pomegranate tree. The red spots on its flanks aren’t blood, but pomegranate juice. Pomegranates are a fertility symbol. Split them open; they look about right.

The funny thing is, they kill the unicorn in the panel before. Then suddenly it’s back at the castle, alive and well and dripping with juice. Rather than assuming the weavers didn’t know what the hell they were doing, we interpret this as a miraculous resurrection.

But what happens to the maiden?

It never says; we never ask.

§

Maidens aren’t meant to run away from unicorns. Our maiden learns this very quickly. She rushes into her house, slamming the door. Sinking against the wall, she waits for her hands to stop shaking.

She was so scared, in the woods. So very, very scared.

But inevitably, the whispers start. They echo through the market square, run counterpoint to the hymns at church. They follow her to the henhouse, the garden, her best friend’s cottage. Wherever she goes, they slide into her ears as insistently as the unicorn’s breath.

It’s an honour, a privilege.

Close your eyes and get it over with.

Lie back.

It only hurts a little.

Our maiden lies in her cot under the attic’s eaves. She cannot sleep. She almost hears the unicorn’s dreadful hooves; she tastes its stench and filth on her tongue.

Your daughter’s giving herself airs, that’s all.

It’s unnatural.

Just tell her to relax. It only hurts a little.

But she’s not scared of it hurting. The maiden twists fistfuls of blanket, the scream bunching in her throat. She doesn’t care about that. She’s fallen out of trees, and cut herself on kitchen knives, and once the cow kicked her. All of that hurt far worse than the unicorn would, she’s quite sure.

As with most cottages, there are gaps in the floorboards. Her parents’ voices float up from the kitchen below.

At least she’s a good girl.

It’s past time, though.

Was it something we did?

The same words, over and over.

Unnatural. Wrong. Broken.

The maiden wipes away burning tears. She has not forgotten the blind panic of the chase, the cuts in her feet, or the unicorn’s breath on her neck. But at this moment, quivering in her tiny bed, she thinks that being broken is worse.

She rolls over, her heart beginning a familiar gallop under her ribs.

She will rejoin the hunt, and this time, she will not run.

§

Honestly, I’m surprised no one talks about this.

Long, hard appendage. Wild beast that goes after virgins.

But no, no, the unicorn is itself a symbol of purity and chastity, even as it places its appendage on virgins’ laps.

Does no one else wonder about that?

Does no one else wonder: who’s really the hunter, here? Is it the man with sword and spear? Or is it the wild beast, stalking the forest for its prey?

§

Same scene, once again.

The sunlit glade: a cleft in the tangled woods. Grass soft and yielding as a marriage bed. The stream winds between the trees like ribbons through a corset. In the clearing’s centre, our maiden sits alone, trying to calm her racing heart. She has a knife tucked under her skirts—for wolves, or bandits. No use dying before the unicorn can get to her. Still, she starts at every sound: the low notes of birdsong, squirrels scrabbling in the branches overhead.

The dread is like metal in her mouth.

It doesn’t take long.

The unicorn pushes through the trees. Its nostrils flare. As it approaches, the maiden steadies herself. Remembering the advice—from her mother, her sister, her aunt, her friend—she forces herself to relax. She closes her eyes, because they say that way, it’s not as bad.

Coarse hair brushes her arm. Something hard and alien nudges insistently at her thigh.

The maiden grits her teeth. She is not unnatural, she is not wrong, she is not broken. She is quarry and bait together; this is the natural way of things. This is the story she has been told—the story we have all been told.

The stiff horn pushes harder against her. A low moan of pleasure issues from deep within the unicorn’s chest. Its tongue flicks over her cheek, and the maiden bites back a sob.

Soon enough, the hunter will come. The pain will end. Her part in the hunt will be over, and she will be maiden no more. Such is the natural way of things; such is the way of the hunt. In all the hunts that have ever been, what maiden ever feared the unicorn?

But our maiden cannot bear the rasp of its goats’ beard on her cheek. She chokes on its musk. The horn trails across her skin, edging closer to the juncture of her legs, and disgust rolls low in the pit of her belly. All her life, she’s tried to see beauty in the unicorn’s mismatched parts. She’s listened to the poetry, and looked at the paintings, and she’s walked the woods in hope and terror of glimpsing it.

All her life, the maiden has tried to understand. And now, she has finally realized: she doesn’t fear the unicorn. She’s repulsed by it.

“No,” she croaks. “No, I don’t want to.”

Even as she says it, the whispers resurge.

Why were you in the woods, then?

You let it into your lap.

It’s fine, don’t worry. It’s just the love it bears fair maidens.

“No!” She shoves the unicorn away. Its ears press flat to its skull, but she’s struggling backwards, her fingers grasping uselessly at the grass. “No, I won’t!”

She gets her feet under her, stands upright before a tree. The unicorn lowers its head, preparing to charge.

§

The maiden never kills the unicorn. She always disappears after some male figure appears and does it for her. The usual story in a nutshell: virginity furthering someone else’s ends, no matter what the maiden herself thinks.

But we left the usual story a while ago.

Our maiden doesn’t like unicorns. That’s fine, too.

Not everyone does.

§

If you can’t get a maiden to lure the unicorn, the next best thing is to stand in front of a tree. You goad the thing into charging at you. If you time things right, you can leap clear at the last moment, and let the unicorn drive its horn into the trunk.

We haven’t mentioned the hunter yet. There’s no strapping woodsman rising to the rescue. In the end, you always face these things alone. And so as the unicorn struggles to free itself, the maiden withdraws her knife.

With every slice into the monster’s neck, she cuts away another thread of shame.

Unnatural.

Wrong.

Broken.

No.

Our maiden is quarry, she is bait, and she is hunter. She is the hunt all unto herself, and she needs no one else. It is not the story she has been told, it is not the story of a thousand poems and songs and paintings, but it is her story.

At last, the thrusting brute falls quiet and still. The maiden wipes her knife on the grass, tucks it back under her skirts. She leaves the horn where it is: wedged into the wood.

She has no use for it.

§

The hunt ends as it always does: with quarry, bait, and hunter.

And the maiden, free at last.

K.T. Bryski is a Canadian author and podcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Apex (among others), and her audio dramas Six Stories, Told at Night and Coxwood History Fun Park are available wherever fine podcasts are found. She is currently at work on her next novel. K.T. is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing; she also has a mild caffeine addiction. Visit her at www.ktbryski.com .

Uncontainable

by Helen Stubbs | 4465 words

4,600 Words

They gave her a name when she was born, but it broke, along with all her other things. Into the dark hearth she smashed the toy wagon I gave her. Its splinters found their way into her feet when she crouched in the ancient soot. I learnt not to give her presents.

I gave her a dress my mother sewed, when I moved in to the Morrisons’ as a boarder, because it cut my heart to see her naked in the cold. The maid, Kate, shot me a doleful glare, then tried to thread the child’s spindly arms into the shift. The girl fought her off, and tore the white fabric into three.

Strands of hair fell around Kate’s face, red and damp with sweat. She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’ll mend it. Take it to the workhouse, where some poor child wants it.”

Kate’s pained expression gauged if I had yet begun to understand.

The girl destroys curtains and has twice broken her windowpane: once with a chair and once with her fists. Glass showered the heads of passers-by on the street, and they came bleeding to the door demanding recompense.

Her father boarded the window up once, but she broke that wood and the skin of her hands as she did it. After that he almost bricked it in.

“But that would have been cruel,” Mrs. Morrison tells me. “One of her two pleasures in life is staring out that window at the sky and street.” Even as winter sleet drifts in. I wonder how the girl’s hands never freeze to the bars at nighttime.

“We barred it up to stop her climbing down the drainpipe and running away,” Mrs Morrison says, as cool as a portrait of herself.

§

I need a name for the girl. I can’t think of her as the girl. In my head, I call her Rochelle: the little rock.

Sometimes, if we are alone, I sing Rochelle a song, repeating her secret name, hoping that she will learn it. She might appear to be listening, but then she’ll shout at the wall, instead. Do I hear syllables in her babbling? It’s hard to know.

When Kate brings her food, she ignores it as often as not.

I believed she had no understanding of language at all until this night:

All the household is sleeping, and I find her awake with her door open, which it never is at night in case she runs away or sets the house on fire.

I pass her room and glance in, to find it awash with moonlight. Her arms embrace her knees. Her toes and short hair shimmer with silver moon-glow.

She’s looking out at the sky, but she says my name. I hear it, though she faces the moon, not me. She turns her head and her dark eyes affix me. Straggles of hair curve around her thin face like claws.

“Good Wife Henny is fair of face but her heart is festerin’ black.” Her voice is sweet and her tongue inexplicably eloquent. “She swaps babies for ill spirits, and sucks the goodness from the soul, to the innocent’s destruction.”

Her gaze is intense but her face is expressionless.

A burst of laughter erupts from my lips and I slam her door closed. It’s the sort of laugh you use as self-defence, then once having shown your teeth, you flee.

My hand twitches on the handle and I try to catch my breath. It has to be a dream so I stumble back to bed.

§

The next morning an elderly woman pauses her long bicycle and cart by our front door. Her black raincoat is several metres long and crinkles as she heaves her load forward. I’ve never seen the like of it before: it’s a cross between a jacket and a tarpaulin.

Rain trickles into pools behind her pointed boots, and she squints against drops spitting in her eyes.

“I have Alfred’s special milk!” she calls up.

Alfred, six months old, must be ready for weaning. He doesn’t think so, as babies seldom do.

Rochelle runs to the window and screeches, loud enough to drown out the clock tower. She scratches her shoulders, drawing blood. Every one of us in the household helps to drag her back from the window, still screaming and writhing as she goes.

She beats upon the floor, and then bangs her head on the boards, too, enough to draw blood. It takes three of us to hold her down—one of them on each leg, and me with her arms pinned above her head.

That is all of us, but for the baby. There’s the sobbing Mrs. Morrison, Kate the capable maid, and me. The father is away on business across the seas, so I have use of the spare room and his study.

Rochelle fights and shouts until the woman gives up ringing and knocking, and rides her bicycle away.

From the window I watch her go. Her long raincoat crinkles and drags along the ground.

The girl lies quietly on the floor, staring at the ceiling without seeing. Her knees have fallen to one side. She has every right to be exhausted.

“Who might that have been?” I ask.

The maid huffs over like a ruffled chook. She pins back loose strands of hair as best she can, though it will need a thorough redoing to be neat. She leans next to me and peers through the bars, down the street. “That was Good Wife Henny.”

“Who is she?”

“A widower … moved here some years ago. Loves babies so. They say she lost her own.”

I squint after her, observing her slow pedal and strange long coat creasing and stretching as she turns.

“Why didn’t she leave the milk on the doorstep?”

The maid laughs. “Henny would never leave her precious delivery on the steps! Every baby takes one draught of her special milk. It keeps them well all the winter.”

“Isn’t that strange? What could be in it?”

Kate laughs and pats me on the shoulder.

I turn to Rochelle, who won’t meet my eye. She rolls around on the floor, pulling back her fingers so far that it must hurt.

I shake my head. “Why do you do that?”

She stands and twirls away, then jumps over to the corner and jumps and jumps. You or I would tire. Rochelle does not.

“I’ll sit with her awhile,” I tell the maid.

Mrs. Morrison hunches in the corner sobbing.

“You need a cuppa, Ma’am,” Kate says, sliding her arm around her back. Mrs. Morrison nods, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. The baby begins to howl in his nursery.

When they’re gone and Rochelle finishes jumping, I lean forward, my elbows on my knees. My fingertips form a steeple.

“Is that true, what you said yesterday, about Good Wife Henny? And that was her, the old lady with the long raincoat that covers her cart.”

She sings a short repetitive tune and lies on her bed, staring at the ceiling, flicking her feet from left to right. I wait a long time for a flash of lucidity like last night’s. Eventually she returns to the window and releases a string of short screams.

Frustration rising and ebbing, I drink the tea the maid brought me, gone cold on the mantelpiece. Eventually, I retire to my room.

§

Rochelle likes to stand over the bassinet by the fire, but Kate seldom lets her. She shoos her away or swats her with a cooking spoon or the flick of a towel. I frown at her, when I see this. The maid blushes and scurries away.

Mrs. Morrison is more giving. She’ll let the girl watch little Alfred, as he sucks his fingers and whimpers small cries, even if she’s rocking him to sleep.

Rochelle never picks him up. If we pick him up, she darts away. She’s afraid of him, I think; his bursts of noise and movement, and the occasional spurt of fluid. Yet she loves him very much.

§

“Sad, sad news,” the maid says, stirring a steaming pot on the stove. “Another baby has died—just when he should be taking his first steps.”

“Died of what?” I ask.

“A sudden fitful fever.”

“So sad.”

Kate nods. “The mother refuses to eat or drink. She will not leave the house. Her other children would starve if not for the kindness of their neighbours and Good Wife Henny.” The maid smiles. “She’s bringing them whatever leftover milk she has. Warm soul.”

“Had the baby drunk the special milk?” I ask.

She laughs. “Of course. Months ago.”

Something about Henny and her milk always makes Kate laugh, even in dire circumstances. I catch a movement in the corner of my eye and glance over to the stairwell.

Rochelle grips the banister with white knuckles and her eyes are wide, her face hostile. I gasp. She’s not allowed outside her room without some supervision, but sometimes her door is open, to my surprise.

Like the night she spoke to me, if that truly happened.

“Never mind her,” Kate says. “She don’t understand a thing.”

§

Rochelle is quiet, rocking in her room, saving herself. Henny appears at the corner, once again attempting our door. Her long raincoat creaks, covering her cart and its contents, full of milk, of course.

That’s a lot of milk she delivers, if it’s milk under her raincoat. Too much milk. But what else could be in there?

The girl threads her arms and legs through her window, like snakes. She’s a spectacle, naked up there, and screaming every profane word she should never have heard. She would hear them, living above the street. But how does she pick them as the foulest?

A crowd stops to listen, mouths wide, grins on some faces. The girl knows words I’ve heard in the roughest of public houses—enough to make me lower my gaze in shame.

We try to pull her away, but she’s as strong as steel. She clamps to the bars like a wicked wrench, bolted and rusted closed.

Below, Good Wife Henny looks up at us, her grey hair bound in neat coils. On her pale cheeks there’s no hint of judgment or embarrassment. Her chin is raised with strict determination.

§

I glance at the slip of paper Mrs. Morrison has given me and check the number on the blue door, then rap with my knuckles.

There’s no answer so I duck and lift the postal flap, and peer down the hall. Through the webbed corners of the slot, beyond the corridor with a faded rug, is a kitchen in glaze-tinted light.

Good Wife Henny lifts a milk bottle to her lips and drinks. She tips her head back and takes a long draught. My view’s obscured by distance, but the bottle appears empty except of rainbows—like those on an oil slick.

I stand up, knock again and wait. Eventually come footsteps, the creak of a raincoat and the trundle of small wheels. She cracks open the door and peers at me from a kindly face.

“Yes?”

Her cheeks are pink, her eyes are blue, and her nose is a modest button.

“May I come in?”

“Who are you?”

“A boarder at the Morrisons’ house. I’ve come to collect the special milk that has proven undeliverable.”

“Oh!” She clasps her hands. “How wonderful. What a good one you are. Come in! Follow me, but not into the kitchen. I’m preparing my milk and the process is delicate.”

“Of course!” I find myself giggling—just like Kate.

She slides backward and opens the door, but she can’t turn in such a narrow hallway. She wouldn’t need her cart with her to pull the milk, so why does she wear her raincoat, three metres long?

I swallow a giggle, which results in a hiccup.

Good Wife Henny returns to the kitchen by walking through the lounge room because she cannot turn in the hall, dress creaking as she waddles.

I squint at the hem and catch a glimpse of a wheel flicking up the coat, and catch the scent of sewing machine oil.

No person could have a rear as long as that. It reminds me of a wasp—or some other insect abdomen full of eggs. Hic. I swallow and refuse to shiver, because I’m not a child at the whim of fanciful imaginings. It was probably the style to wear enormous long skirts when she grew up.

She beams at me and I raise my gaze to meet hers.

“I’ll fetch you a bottle from the cellar. Please sit on the lounge—warm yourself by the fire.”

“Thank you. Hic. ” I force a grin and remove my hat, then make to sit on the lounge as she glances back and rounds the corner out of the kitchen and down to the cellar.

I move silently to the table with two-dozen empty bottles (less one). I clamp a hand over my mouth to silence my hiccups.

The bottles are empty, but their lids are fastened on and they contain that rainbow shimmer. Do they really—or is it a trick of the light?

The missing bottle must be the one that she drank … there it is, in the sink. Is a baby dying somewhere, just as Rochelle said, because Henny consumed its soul?

Other bottles with dregs of milk languish in a bucket, giving off a cheesy odour which mingles with the perfume of dried flowers and herbs—jasmine, sage, and lavender, hanging from the windowsill.

Hic.

When she rounds the corner, with the special mixture, I’m seated on the lounge.

She pauses and sniffs, near the table where I’d stood. I’m glad I didn’t touch anything. Yet, she knows I’ve been there, doesn’t she, as though there’s a trace of my scent on the air, or echoes of my stifled hiccups.

But her bottles are still there, and she has no reason to be suspicious, and her face is hospitality and love as she hands me Alfred’s special milk, wraps my palms around it, and covers my hands with hers.

“I hope to serve your son, one day. Fine lad he’ll be!” Her blue eyes shine, and I know she is pure benevolence, nothing other.

“How wonderful.” My smile blooms in response to hers.

“Do you promise?” Her grip tightens. A sliver of her fingernail slices a crease in my knuckle. Blood drips from my finger onto the carpet, splashing micro-droplets upward then soaking in.

Eyes locked on hers as I laugh and back away, cradling the milk and bowing.

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

“Bring me the bottle, when he’s done.”

“Of course.” I tip my hat.

§

Rochelle meets me at the lower steps, when I return home. She hisses, then darts away. I recoil from this unusual aggression, and head for the kitchen where I almost collide with Kate.

“Ah, good,” she says, relieving me of the bottle and affixing a teat. “Mrs. Morrison is out visiting another poor bereaved mother, and I have dusting to do on the upper floors. Alfred is late for his breakfast, napping. I’ll put this in a bowl to warm. If he wakes, could you give him his bottle?”

Another baby has died? And yet, Henny, so kind, could not be the culprit.

Rochelle is watching me. I glance back at her, then nod.

Kate bustles away and I sit at the kitchen table, staring at the milk and glancing at Rochelle. Perhaps I should tip it down the sink.

She creeps nearer, pausing by the table, staring at the milk like it’s a snake. Suddenly, she crosses the room and snatches it from its saucepan.

“Hey!” I cry.

She bolts up the stairs, taking several at once with her small dirty feet. I chase her up to find her sitting on the bed, arms wrapped around the bottle, rocking.

“Give it to me.”

She holds it up and sucks it all down.

I try to stop her, but words catch in my throat. I reach out to snatch it but she strikes me so hard I recoil, cradling my arm to my chest. I wince at the blush on my wrist, awaiting a bruise.

Rochelle finishes the bottle and raises it over her head to cast it from the window. Her arm extends through the bars.

“Stop! I have to return the bottle.”

She doesn’t seem to hear. My arms are longer than hers and I reach over before it flies, snatching it from her hand. My fingers slide over the wet glass and the bottle spins upward, over and over. I catch it by the teat and bring it back into the room.

The girl bounces up and down on her bed, laughing. She throws her head around then slams her whole body into the wall.

Violence is normal, but laughter is unusual.

A dreadful suspicion settles over me.

“Did you just want the milk for yourself?”

I walk to the door and pause, momentarily dizzy. I rub my temples with finger and thumb.

“Thank you,” a sweet voice says.

I spin around and see only her back and hair. She’s straddled the windowsill, one leg through the bars.

It can’t have been her who spoke, yet there’s no one else in the room.

In the kitchen, I reaffix the lid, and search for a shimmer in the bottle. I change my mind and wash out the dregs, then fasten the lid again. The shimmer is more obvious now. Maybe oil is mixed into the glass for aesthetics or preservative properties.

On impulse, I lick the inside of the teat. Normal milk, so far as I can tell.

Kate pokes her head in.

“Did he wake?”

I make a quick decision—for ill or worse.

“He woke, drank, and slept again.”

“Thank you.” She smiles. “The drapes are almost done. I’ll start to prepare your lunch.”

§

I watch from across the street as Good Wife Henny collects the bottle, which I have dutifully returned, from her doorstep.

At home, Rochelle appears unchanged. She doesn’t sicken or die. Months pass and I wonder if what we did was right or terrible.

Her birthday comes and goes. She’s uncommonly quiet that day with just a few screams, and less thrashing and yelling than usual. The day goes unmarked by cake or candles. Kate says it’s not worthy of celebration.

“It means nothing to the girl,” she says. “It only brings Mrs. Morrison pain, as she fails to grow toward the young lady we wish she’d be.”

I only discover it’s her birthday by looking in the family bible, and there I find her name is Rachel Elizabeth Morrison. How close I was! But my guess at her age was wide of field. She is eight, while I would have said six, at most.

I smuggle in a cupcake from the patisserie, light a candle on it and sing happy birthday to Rochelle.

She has no interest in eating it, but grinds it into crumbs and rolls them through her fingers with pleasure.

Baby Alfred’s birthday comes, too, and he is bonnier than ever. He eats birthday cake and cream. He smiles, coos, and shows no sign of taking ill with the dreaded sickness that’s stricken so many of his peers.

Rochelle, though, is eerily quiet that day. She cannot be coaxed to taste the cream. As night descends her condition worsens. She writhes in her bed, moaning with fever. She refuses to take even a sip of water.

“This is a first,” Kate says, with too little compassion. “She’s usually as healthy as a horse.”

“You must call the doctor.”

“He refuses to come.”

Mrs. Morrison is quiet and prayerful, watching her child’s fever worsen, applying wet cloths to her forehead and rinsing them in a pail. The fire roars in the hearth, tempering the open window’s chill.

I wonder what Mrs. Morrison prays for. A flare from the fire illuminates her squinted glare. I draw back, horrified she might be praying her child will die.

Near midnight, the moon passes behind a cloud. Rochelle’s energy returns, fueled by demonic possession. She sweats and thrashes, rises and throws her blanket into the fire. The gust blows burning coals out onto the floor.

I douse the flames with water from the bucket. The blanket burns with a sickening smell. Kate fishes it out, into the bucket, and the fire dwindles.

Rochelle screams.

“Could a priest help her?” I ask.

“He can’t get near her,” her mother says.

Rochelle appears to quieten down, then suddenly she’s up again. She attacks Mrs. Morrison, who pushes her away and backs out of the room.

“Out, everyone!” Mrs. Morrison cries, and we join her in the hall.

Rochelle collapses on the floor, still. Her mother closes and bolts the door. “Nothing can be done for her.”

My heart aches for Rochelle.

“I’ll sit with her,” I offer. “If she’s not long for this world, she shouldn’t die alone on the floor.”

Mrs. Morrison crosses her arms.

“Someone should be with her. And I have no relationship to her—not like you. It brings me less pain.”

She nods and returns to her room.

I open the door. I lift Rochelle’s still body and place her in her bed, then sit in the corner and wait.

At intervals, all night, she fights invisible monsters. It’s like something is trying to devour her soul. Anything weaker would lose this fight, but not her, not the little rock.

Her nails claw; her teeth gnash. Curse words tear from her lips, as though her spirit is fighting for survival and damning itself in the bargain.

§

Dawn’s rays wake me. To my surprise, Rochelle’s chest rises and falls. Her colour is good and her cheeks firm. The shadows beneath her eyes have lightened. Could I wake her if I tried? I shake her. She doesn’t stir. It could be a heavy sleep. I resolve to leave her be.

I hope to never endure another night like that for as long as I live. I descend the stairs, seeking coffee.

The maid’s eyes are red and swollen. She dabs at her wet cheeks with a handkerchief. Mrs. Morrison sits at the table, staring into space, as though she’s heard one tragedy too many.

“Don’t cry,” I say. “She seems to be on the mend.”

The maid silences me with a finger to her lips, then takes my shoulders and leads me into the sitting room. I obey, tired and confused.

“You should sit down.” She gestures to the chair by the hearth.

I sit.

“Good Wife Henny has been grievously murdered.” Anguish creases Kate’s forehead. “The neighbour said it was like something had gouged its way out from her womb; scratched free from inside her belly.”

She puts her hand to her chin and shakes her head. “Must have been some lunatic. Savaged her and tore her apart. They found her innards hanging all down her skirt. Can you imagine?”

This news is too much for me.

I stand and run from the room, startling Mrs. Morrison in the kitchen. I shove open the front door, stumble down the steps and stand in the garden, coughing in the chill air.

When I reach the street, I begin to run.

Like something had gouged its way out from inside her.

Something she was trying to digest?

The cold stings my cheeks and burns my lungs.

Her innards hung down her skirt.

Which skirt? The long one? And — what was inside it?

My heart races. Blood pounds in my ears.

I’m almost there. I turn left and then turn right. People clear out of my way. I have a purpose or a madness with which they’d best not interfere.

There is Good Wife Henny’s front door.

I look both ways. The street is quiet.

I take the path to the door. When I touch it, it swings open. It’s dimmer than the last time I was there, and the musty smell has been subsumed by death’s stench. Her body’s been removed from the puddle of dark blood. No one has yet cleaned the floor.

I make my way down the hall, tripping on the rumpled rug. Picture frames are broken, shards litter the floor, and drawers have been upended, but the bottles in the kitchen are untouched. I nudge them off their chair, with a spin, and they smash.

I round the corner and peer down to the cellar, then light a candle before I descend. Creaking step by creaking step, I enter the darkness.

There, propped up against a wall, is what I hoped to find: the long raincoat and whatever is within. Henny must have removed it in the night, during her fight.

I need to know what’s inside, though my heart hammers in my chest and I dread what I’ll find.

I squat alongside and carefully peel back the leather.

A pale and hairless skull stares at me, dead eyes unseeing. Tiny hands clench in a frozen memory of pain. A litter of others like this fill the cart: sick, deformed babies, all different sizes and stages of development. Some sucked milk from tubes, others’ bellies show umbilical cords which wind away toward the front of the cart.

The children are curled up within a structure of cane and tubing. She must have connected those pipes to her breasts and — other parts.

I shake my head in horror and cover my nose against the smell. I bite down on my scream but stumble sideways, into a puddle of ooze. “Aurgh.”

The children aren’t alive, but nor are they long dead. They must have lost their lives when Henny lost hers.

Then the bigger child shifts and I notice her. She’s older and too big for a baby’s cage, but she isn’t fully formed. There’s only her slack skin, grey eyes and a slowly pulsing heart. No bones, no muscle, for she was not properly stolen. Her soul fought its way free.

Her head rocks back and she seizes, limbs twitching within her wicker restraints. I reach out for her, touch her cool shoulder. She falls still. The heart which protruded from her skin has stopped. No pulse. No breath.

Will this set the real Rochelle free, or leave her dead, too?

I turn and bolt up the stairs, through the hall and down the steps. I take the path and turn onto the street. A man in a uniform slams into me, his happy whistling disrupted. “Oi! Watch where you’re going!” It’s with good humour, though. He shines a friendly smile.

“Sorry!” I push him away.

“Hey, it’s my lucky day.” He passes me a letter. “This one’s for you.”

Shaken, I glance at the name.

“You’re a postman?” I say. “Thank you.”

I turn and run, my heels pounding the footpath all the way home. I burst in the door, drawing shrieks and glares from Kate and Mrs. Morrison.

I bolt up the stairs and find Rochelle lying in her bed, deathly still, covers on. I dash across and jab her chest, too hard. Her eyes snap open and she rolls away, babbling.

“You’re alright,” I whisper. “Thank God. I thought you’d be dead.”

Her babbling continues towards the wall, until she pauses for breath. And then, quietly:

“Postman Christie lures lonely hearts to the moors with false admirers. He farewells bludgeoned corpses on the ebbing tide.”

“Postman …”

I turn over the letter in my hands, from an unknown JR Christie.

I toss the letter into the fire.

Helen Stubbs writes stories that are dark with pointy edges, published on Amazon and in anthologies and magazines including The Never Never Land , Midnight Echo , and Winds of Change . She interviews for Galactic Chat and the Australian SF Snapshot . In 2010 she won the Worldcon short story competition and in 2015 she won a Ditmar Award for Best New Talent in Australian SF.

She’s a keen obstacle course racer (think Tough Mudder and Spartan) and loves zip-lining and hiking. Sometimes she climbs things she shouldn’t! Check out her blog or say ‘hi’ on Twitter to @superleni .

When She Comes

by Onu-Okpara Chiamaka | 790 words

800 Words

“I have been expecting you,” the man says. He watches the fluid form solidify — teeth first, then hair, wide jigida -clad hips and soft-soft skin gleaming reddish-brown from uli — inside his hut. The smell of lemongrass fills the room. Metal anklets jangle as the newly formed woman takes a step towards him.

The man looks down, pretends to ignore her. He picks a large, ox-blood–colored feather on the floor and continues stirring something in a clay pot. “I thought they’d send someone else for me.” He stirs faster: clockwise, anti-clockwise. Mist rises, fills the hut. And it is suddenly a fog so strong that it obscures a red, sun-shaped flame hovering near the thatched roof. When the room clears, the man is looking at her. His lips are turned up in a smirk.

Her smile matches his. “That was impressive.”

“That was nothing,” he says. “Also, I’m not going anywhere.”

The woman’s eyes widen in surprise; then, she roars in laughter. “You have no choice,” she says, wiping tears from her cheeks. “You know how it works, how it is written. Everyone has a day assigned for their death. Today is yours.”

The grinding noise from his teeth fills the room. His voice is venom. Steel. “How dare you threaten me? You couldn’t take me even if I lay dying, woman.” He spits out the word, woman , like it is unwashed bitter-leaf. “Do you know who I am? I have studied at the feet of Gods: Ala, Amadioha, even your master, Ekwensu.”

She sighs. There is a raffia bag slung over her shoulder and she reaches into it. Out comes a glowing orb as big as a baby’s head. The ball floats into the air and sits next to the warm, red flame. Its light is blue, sharp as lightning; it throws into stark relief thousands of patterns, lines: nsibidi drawn with charcoal and uli on the clay wall over his bamboo bed.

“You have history, destinies written on your walls, yet you fight yours?”

“Nothing is set in stone,” he says. “I have stopped droughts, plagues. I have given life to the dead. Changing destinies is not hard work.”

She smiles. Her walk is slow and sensual; the space between them disappears. “There is no need to boast.” She squats behind him and her nails trace a pattern from his lips, past a mutilated left ear, to the back of his bald head. “Everyone knows who you are. Ozokandu, the greatest witch-doctor in all the ten kingdoms!” His scalp tingles beneath her hand; spores blossom where her touch lingers.

“You know me!” He is calmer and his voice is laced with laughter as he smacks his chest with both palms, a customary acknowledgment after a salute. His teeth clatter as he jerks, stands up.‎

“Your touch is cold, woman.” And in response to an unheard command, his red flame drowns the blue light. Heat radiates from the mini sun in waves and spreads through the room. He helps her up and cups her face in one palm. “Your kind is usually warm bodies and warm crevices. Perhaps, if you learn the proper way to entice a man, one will actually follow to his death without a fight. Breasts and hips like yours can only do so much, but nobody likes a cold woman.”

She smiles. “I have heard.”

“You should go,” he says. “Ndudim lives down the road. He has been sick for many days and I think he would be glad to see you.”

The woman nods.

“Don’t forget your orb.”

The orb’s glow has grown weak and it sputters and falls like a dying firefly. “Ozokandu! Dimkpa ! Your magic is strong.”

He beats his chest. “Do you not know that I foresaw your plan to drain my essence with that thing? That was why I burnt mpichi when you came.” His grin is replaced by a frown as he bends to pick up the clay pot by his feet. His hands are shaking.

“You are indeed great, Ozokandu, tamer of even immortals. Live in peace then. I shall take a peek at Ndudim.”

“Greet your master, woman.”

Her waist is liquid as she saunters out.

§

In a hut at the edge of a bamboo forest, the heat from a magic flame burns hotter, hotter, bending to a wizard’s command, his need for warmth. White fairy dust pours from this wizard’s head and his skin grows ashy, like nzu . And when this wizard, the greatest witch-doctor in all the ten kingdoms, staggers outside his hut, his mouth is stuffed full of cotton and he cannot understand how.

Somewhere, a dying orb burns out. The night is silent for only a second.

Onu-Okpara Chiamaka is a Nigerian writer who loves everything weird. She often lets her imagination run wild and can be found staring into space, thinking of will-o’-the-wisps or haunted forests. You can find some of her fiction on Kahalari Review and Naija Stories.

I Remember the Future

by Michael A. Burstein | 4105 words

4,200 Words

I remember the future.

The future was glorious once. It was filled with sleek silver spaceships, lunar colonies, and galactic empires. The horizon seemed within reach; we could almost grasp the stars if we would but try.

I helped to create that future once. We created it out of our blood, sweat, and tears for a penny a word. We churned that future out onto reams of wood pulp paper, only to see the bitter acids of the decades eat it away. I can still smell the freshness of that world, amidst the stale odors left in the libraries, real ink on real paper.

But I despair that no one else does.

§

Smith turned to Angela, whose face was obscured by the glass plate of her helmet. Despite the higher gravity and the bulkiness of his environmental suit, he felt like jumping a hundred feet into the vacuum.

“Angela, look!”

“What is it?” she asked. She reached over with her gloved hands to take the object from him.

“Gently,” he said as he handed over the sheet. “It’s paper. Real paper.”

Angela took it and handled it almost reverently. Once again, she looked around the large cavern at the many inscribed marble columns, flashing her light into every dark corner.

“Paper? That dead wood stuff you told me about? Made from trees?”

Smith nodded. “It’s true. We’ve found the ancient lost library of New Earth. And maybe, just maybe, in these volumes we’ll find the final clue that will lead us to the location of the original human home world.”

—Abraham Beard, The Searchers (1950)

§

The day after my diagnosis, Emma comes to visit me at home. When she rings the bell, I get up from my seat in the living room, where I’ve been watching Forbidden Planet on DVD for the past hour, and I shuffle over to the front door at the end of the hall.

A cold wind blasts me as I creak open the door. I shiver momentarily as Emma strides past me.

As I shut the door, she opens the hall closet and lets her hands dance upon the hangers. She ignores the empty wooden ones and selects a blue plastic one.

“It’s the middle of the day and you’re still in your bathrobe?” she asks me as she slips off her overcoat.

“I’m retired and it’s the weekend,” I say. “Why should I get dressed up?”

“Because your only daughter is coming to visit? Oh, never mind.” She hangs up her coat.

“Where’s Frank and the kids?” I ask her.

She sniffs. “They decided to stay at home.”

The kids decided to stay at home. My grandchildren, Zachary and Kenneth. Or Zach and Ken, as Emma told me they prefer to be called. I haven’t seen them in months. “They didn’t feel like schlepping out to Queens?”

“It’s too cold.”

“So why the visit?”

Emma purses her lips and glances at the floor. “I thought it would be nice to see you.”

I know there must be more to it than that, but I don’t press it. Emma will tell me in her own sweet time. “Are you hungry?” I ask as we walk to the living room. “Do you want something to eat?”

She smiles. “What are you going to offer this time? A red pepper? A clementine?”

As it so happens, the refrigerator crisper holds many peppers and clementines, but I refuse to give Emma the satisfaction. “I thought you might want some ice cream.”

“Ice cream?” she asks with bemusement. “Sure, I’d love some ice cream. Where is it?”

“It’s in the freezer,” I tell her, although it should be obvious. Where else does one keep ice cream?

§

The first thing Larry noticed was the cold. It filled the core of his being, then slowly began to recede as tendrils of warmth entered his body.

Then he noticed a faint white light, blinking in the distance. Either the light became larger or it moved closer, and it continued to pulsate in a regular rhythm.

And finally he heard a hiss, the sound of air leaking quickly across a barrier. He tried to breathe and felt as if his lungs were filled with liquid. He tried again—

—when suddenly a door swung open, and Larry realized that he was floating vertically in a round glass chamber. The gelatinous liquid surrounding him quickly drained, and Larry fell into the arms of two men in silver jumpsuits.

“Easy now,” the taller one said. “Your muscles need time to adjust.”

Larry shook off their support. “I’m fine,” he croaked. He coughed up some fluid and spoke again. “I don’t need any help.”

“If you say so,” the taller man said.

“I do, indeed,” Larry answered. He stretched out of his stoop, and although his legs felt like they would give way, he refused to give these strangers the satisfaction of seeing him fall.

“Where am I? What’s going on?” he asked.

“All in due time,” the shorter man said in a thin, reedy voice.

Larry turned to stare at him. “I am Larry Garner, the richest man on Earth, and I demand you tell me what’s going on, now!”

The two men looked at each other, and the shorter one shrugged. “Usually, we give people more time to adjust, but if you insist—”

“I do!”

“You’re in the future,” the man said. “It’s two thousand years since you died.”

Larry fainted.

—Abraham Beard, The Unfrozen (1955)

§

“Earth to Dad? Hello? Are you there?”

Emma is waving a hand in front of my face.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just thinking. My mind—”

“Was elsewhen. Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

I realize that we are sitting in the dining room and that Emma has scooped two bowls of ice cream, one for each of us. I pick up my spoon and take a bite. It’s butter pecan.

I hate butter pecan, but I bought some for when Zach and Ken were last here.

The ice cream is very badly freezer-burned. It’s so cold against my tongue that it hurts. I put the spoon down into the bowl and watch Emma eat her ice cream.

“You can take the rest of it when you leave,” I say. “The kids might enjoy it.”

Emma gives me a half-smile. “Even with the cold outside, it’ll probably still melt before I get it home.”

“Oh,” I say.

We sit in silence for a few moments, the only sound the tick of the analog clock in the other room, the clock my wife, Sheila, bought when we got married, the clock that hangs above the flatscreen television set that Emma and Frank gave me for my last birthday.

“So, how are things?”

“Things are good.”

“The kids doing well at school?”

“Yeah.” Emma smiles. “Zach did a PowerPoint presentation on blogging for one of his teachers.”

I nod and try to keep my face neutral, but Emma sees right through me. “You disapprove?”

“It’s not that,” I say. “It’s just—”

“I know what it is. Rant number twenty-three.”

“I’m not that predictable.”

She crosses her arms. “Fine. Then what were you thinking?”

I pause for a moment, but she doesn’t sound sarcastic so I say, “When I was growing up, the future seemed so full of possibilities.”

“We have possibilities, Dad.”

I shake my head. “We’ve turned inward. All of us have. We used to dream of a world as big as the sky. Now we’re all hunched over our tiny screens.”

Emma rolls her eyes. “Like I said, rant number twenty-three. Within three sentences, you’re going from the Internet to the lack of a manned space program again.”

“You don’t think it’s a problem?”

“It’s just that I’ve heard it before.”

“The more true something is, the more it bears repeating.”

“Nothing bears repeating if you can’t do anything about it.” She sighs. “I mean, seriously, what did you ever expect me to do at the age of twelve when you first warned me about the eventual heat death of the universe?”

§

The starship HaTikvah had finally made it to the edge of the universe. A hopeful mood filled the souls of the fifty thousand humans and aliens who occupied the ship, each the last of their kind.

On the bridge, Captain Sandra McAllister spoke into her intercom. “Fellow sentients,” she said, “this is the proverbial ‘it.’ The universe is ending, the embers of the stars are fading into nothing, and in a moment we’ll tap into the power of Black Hole Omega. If all goes according to plan, we’ll break out of our dying universe and into a new one, one that’s young and vibrant. Our own personal lives will continue, but more importantly, we will continue to exist in order to be able to remember all of those who came before us.”

McAllister turned to her first officer and said, “Any time you’re ready, Jacob. Push the button.”

Jacob nodded and reached out with his spindly fingers to the Doorway Device. But just as he was about to depress the red button, a blast rocked the ship.

“What was that?” he cried out.

Virilion, the ship’s robotic helmsman, replied in a croak, “It’s the Nichashim! They’ve come to stop us!”

McAllister narrowed her eyes. “Like hell they will,” she said. “Virilion, fire at will! Blast them out of our sky!”

—Abraham Beard, Fire and Ice (1980)

§

“Dad? Dad?”

“You don’t need to shout.”

“You were gone again,” she says.

“Perhaps,” I say, “I’m turning inward because I’m getting old.”

For the first time since she came into the house today, Emma looks worried. “You’re not that old, Dad.”

I smile at Emma to keep her from noticing the wetness I feel in my eyes. “That’s nice of you to say, but it’s not true. I am old.”

“You’re only as old as you feel. You told me that once.”

I shake my head. “It’s hard to feel young when so many of my colleagues are gone.” First Robert, then Isaac, now Arthur, I think, although I don’t say it aloud. I know Emma too well; she might laugh at me for placing myself among such giants.

Instead, she doesn’t seem to know what to say in response. She fidgets for a few seconds, eats some more ice cream, and then changes the subject.

“Listen, Dad, I’m here because I have news.”

“Funny, so do I. You go first.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. What is it?” I ask.

She takes a deep breath and looks me in the eye. “We’re moving to California.”

§

Jackie looked at the gleaming silver spaceship with portholes running all up and down its sides. She felt more excited than she ever had before in her six years of life. Soon, her family would leave behind this polluted, depressing planet for a new world filled with cool green fields, rich with possibilities.

Jackie’s mother and father held tightly onto her hands as the three of them walked in the line out onto the launching pad. The hoverlift floated next to them, carrying their luggage, while Jackie’s robot dog kept running ahead and back toward Jackie, matching her excitement.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but Jackie knew was only minutes according to her chronometer, Jackie and her parents made it to the open hatch of the spaceship. A stewardess, her hair dyed platinum blonde, stood at the doorway greeting the immigrants with a big smile. She took their tickets and welcomed them aboard.

“Is this really it, Dad?” Jackie asked

Her father removed the pipe from his mouth and smiled. “It is indeed,” he said. “Goodbye, Earth! Next stop, Mars!”

—Abraham Beard, The Burns Family on Mars (1960)

§

“Dad? You’re gone again.”

“No, I’m not,” I say.

“So.” Emma says. “We’re moving to California.”

“Why?”

She takes a deep breath. “Frank’s got a new job. UCLA is offering him a tenured position. Full professor.”

“UCLA. Hm. California.” I try to sound as noncommittal as possible, although Emma must know how much this news hurts me.

“Yes, California.”

“From what I hear, California is a nice place.”

She frowns and looks puzzled. “Aren’t you going to object?”

“Are you asking me to?”

“Don’t you even want to know why we’re moving?”

“You told me—Frank’s got a job offer.” I pause. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to keep working at the New-York Historical Society if you’re living in L.A. Have you found a job at a museum there?”

Now she pauses before speaking. “I’m not planning to get another job, at least not right away.”

“Oh?”

“I want to be there full time for the kids.”

I stare into her eyes, seeing the six-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to be the first astronaut to walk on Jupiter. “Is that really what you want?”

She glares at me. “I think at least one parent should be devoted full time to raising the kids.”

I feel the sting of her words. I consider once again telling her what I’ve told her before: that times were tough, that money was tight, and that Sheila and I both had to work to support Emma properly. But then I recall the many times I shut the door of my home office on Emma to meet a deadline, and I realize that the chance for apologies and explanations has passed far into the mists of time.

§

Allen Davidoff walked around the floating cube of mist, careful not to let any of the tendrils touch him. There was nothing else on this planet for miles around.

The Keeper, still covered entirely in her white garment, walked three paces behind him until he finally came to a stop.

He turned to face her. “Impressive,” he said. “An atmospheric phenomenon?”

She laughed and her hazel eyes twinkled. “You are pretending to be the fool,” she said. “You know better than that.”

Allen nodded; she was right. He did know better, but he had previously allowed his hopes to be raised during his quixotic quest only to have them dashed time and time again.

“Then I’ve really found it?” he asked.

She nodded. “You have indeed.”

Allen looked back into the white mist. “It’s the Gateway of Time,” he said. “I can go anywhen into the time stream I want.”

“It’s the Gateway of Time,” the Keeper echoed. “You can go to any time period and any location in the universe you want. But there is one problem.”

Allen waited. The Keeper remained silent as his watch ticked off the seconds, and so finally he asked, “What’s the problem?”

The Keeper grinned evilly. “The only problem is, once you’ve made your choice and entered the past, you can never return. The trip is one way and final.”

“So—”

“So choose wisely.”

—Abraham Beard, Amidst the Mists (1991)

§

“I hope it works out for you,” I say. “You know that I only want what’s best for you and the kids.”

If she notices that I don’t mention Frank, she doesn’t say anything about it. Instead, she nods and says, “You said before that you had news as well.”

I open my mouth to tell her about my diagnosis, as I had planned to do when she first called to tell me that she and the family wanted to see me, but then I hold back. I’m not dying yet, but I am old. My doctors say that my mind is not as sharp as it once was and my years are drawing to a close. If I tell her, maybe she and Frank will postpone the move, or at least stay closer to New York City, so I can keep seeing them in my dwindling, final days.

§

The last man on Earth said farewell to the spaceship carrying the rest of humanity to the stars. As the ship became a tiny dot in the sky, he took a deep breath of the fresh air and smiled. Someone had to watch over the planet as it was dying, and it was only right, he felt, that it should be he, and only he.

—Abraham Beard, The Final Days of Planet Earth (1970)

§

I decide not to tell Emma about the diagnosis. It wouldn’t be fair to her or the kids to add that factor into the equation. But she’s waiting for me to tell her my news, and I only have one other piece of news to share. It’s extremely private, and possibly just the first symptom of my oncoming dementia, but I’ve felt the need to tell someone. And Emma is here, and Sheila is no longer here.

“Emma, may I confide in you?”

She tilts her head. “You never have before.”

I open my mouth to object, and then realize that she has a point.

“Well, I want to confide in you now. You know all those stories, all those novels that I wrote?”

“Yes,” she says flatly. “What about them?”

“My entire life, I never felt like I was coming up with anything on my own.” I stare over her shoulder. “Sometimes, when I was lying awake at two or three in the morning, I would get the feeling that the images in my mind weren’t just things I was making up myself. I felt as if I was a conduit, as if I had lifted an antenna into some sort of cosmic fog and that I was receiving messages, real messages, from the future in my dreams.”

Emma sits stoically as I tell her this. I don’t know what reaction I am hoping for, but Emma rolling her eyes is definitely not it. Still, it’s what she gives me.

“So what’s the news?”

“I’m not really sure,” I say. “You know how I haven’t written anything new for five years now? That’s because the messages stopped. Except …”

“Except what?”

“The dreams have started up again. I’ve been waking up again in the middle of most nights, feeling as if the future is trying to reach me one more time. But as soon as I wake up, the images the future is trying to send me recede into the distance.”

She sighs and stands up; I can’t tell if she’s angry or just frustrated. “You’re bouncing story ideas off of me again, aren’t you?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No, I’m not. This is really happening to me.”

Emma’s expression is pitiful. “So that’s your excuse,” she says softly. “The future was really trying to contact you, and that’s why you always had your head lost in the clouds.”

I try to protest, but, ironically, I have no words. Emma picks up the bowls and used spoons and takes them into the kitchen. I hear her wash them quickly and leave them on the drainer while I sit at the table, unsure of what to say to her to make it all better.

She emerges from the kitchen and dashes through to the hall closet. I hear her put on her coat, and then she is back in the dining room, standing over me.

“Dad, you were always so busy living in the future that you never enjoyed your present. And now you don’t even live in the future anymore. You’re living in the past.”

With that, she walks out of the room and out of the house.

§

Over the next few days, Emma uses my spare set of keys to let herself into the house. She barely nods hello to me as she climbs to the attic and sifts through the boxes, packing away those few remnants that she wants from her childhood.

I want Emma to leave the photographs, but I’ve come to realize that she’s going to have to take them with her anyway if I want my grandsons to continue to remember what their grandfather and grandmother looked like. Emma tells me that she will scan the photos into her computer and send me back the originals, and I just nod.

The days pass far too quickly. Finally, the last morning arrives in which Emma will be coming over to take the last few boxes of possessions. What she doesn’t know as she is driving over is that this morning is also the morning of my final moments on this Earth. And in my final moments on this Earth, I am redeemed.

§

I am lying in my bed, wearing my favorite blue pajamas and peering through my glasses at the small print of a digest magazine. A half-eaten orange on a plate sits on my end table; I can still taste the juice on my tongue and feel a strand of pulp between two right molars.

And then it begins.

A slight breeze wafts toward me from the foot of my bed. I move my magazine aside and look, but I see nothing there but the wall and the closed bathroom door.

As I begin to read again, another breeze flutters my pages. Then the breeze builds, until a gust of wind flows past.

A tiny crack appears in midair, hovering about six and a half feet above the red-carpeted floor. The crack expands into a circular hole. White light emanates from the hole, which gets wider and wider, until it becomes a sphere about six feet in diameter, crackling softly with electricity. A human figure in a silver spacesuit, its face obscured by a helmet, emerges from the sphere with a loud popping sound.

I know this is no illusion, that whatever is happening in front of me is real. I manage to keep my composure and ask, “Who are you?”

The figure grabs hold of its helmet, breaks the seals, and pulls it off.

The astronaut is a woman. She shakes her long blonde hair out of her face and smiles. “You know who I am, Abe. Take a good look.”

I do, and I feel a chill. “It can’t be.”

She nods. “It is.”

“You’re Sandra McAllister. But you’re fictional. You don’t exist. I made you up.”

“Yes, you did make me up. But I do exist.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We figured you might not, but we don’t have a lot of time, so listen carefully. As far as our scientists have been able to determine, every time you wrote a story, you created a parallel universe, a place where the people you thought of really existed. Apparently, your brain has some connection on a quantum level with the zero-point energy field that exists in the multiverse. You’ve managed to bend reality, our reality, so that we ended up existing for real.”

“That’s not possible,” I say.

“You’re a rational man, Abe, I understand that. So explain my presence some other way.”

I know in my heart and soul that I am not hallucinating. And with the impossible eliminated, I am left with the improbable.

“So you’re real?”

“Not just me,” Sandra says.

I start thinking of all the characters I created throughout my career. “Jackson Smith and Angela Jones? Larry Garner? Jackie Burns? Allen Davidoff? They’re all real?”

Sandra nods after I recite each name. “They’re all real. We’re all real.”

“Even if so, how did you break through the barrier between universes? It’s not possible.”

“It is if you harness the energy of a black hole using the Doorway Device.”

I am puzzled for just a moment, and then light dawns. I recall the details of the story cycle from which Sandra comes. “The spaceship HaTikva, ” I say.

“And the Nichashim, ” she adds.

I goggle. “You’re mortal enemies,” I say. “I wrote you that way. How can you be working together?”

“The Nichashim understand that you created them too. We’ve got the two ships tethered together in orbit around New Black Hole Omega.”

I can’t help it; I flip the sheet off of my frail body and swing my legs around so I can stand up and face Sandra. “That’s far too dangerous, Sandra. You could lose both ships in a blink.”

“Which is why you must hurry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why do you think I came here?”

“Um, to say hello? To let me know that I didn’t live my life in vain?”

She rolls her eyes. “To rescue you. To cure you of your oncoming sickness, and to impart to you the same immortality you generously granted to all of us.”

“Rescue me? You’re using all that energy just to rescue me?”

She shrugged. “You’re our father. Why wouldn’t we?”

I feel tears starting in my eyes, and I move forward and hug Sandra as tightly as I can. She holds me as I cry.

“It’s all right, Father,” she says. “We’ve come for you. Welcome home.”

§

The last bit I can only guess at, as I was already gone by then. But the way I see it, as Emma was turning her keys in the lock, the house rumbled, and she heard a loud pop and whoosh coming from upstairs.

“Dad? Dad?” she called out, but I wasn’t there to answer her.

She dashed up the stairs and turned right, toward her father’s bedroom. She pushed the door open to discover her father already gone, amidst a trace of ozone.

I remembered the future.

And in turn, the future remembered me.

Originally published in the collection I Remember the Future: The Award-Nominated Stories of Michael A. Burstein (Apex Publications, 2008).

Michael A. Burstein, winner of the 1997 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, has earned ten Hugo nominations and four Nebula nominations for his short fiction, collected in I Remember the Future. Burstein lives with his wife Nomi and their twin daughters in the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Town Meeting Member and Library Trustee. When not writing, he edits middle and high school Science textbooks. He has two degrees in Physics and attended the Clarion Workshop. More information on Burstein and his work can be found on his webpage http://www.mabfan.com .

Red Christmas

And so his mind shies from the glare of time present and travels elsewhere, to another time and place of his own making, and to a sordid little tale of shund, that is to say, of pulp—of blackmail, violence, and murder.

by Lavie Tidhar | 5306 words

5,700 Words

In another time and place, Shomer still has Fanya and the children. He watches his wife as she lights the Hannukah candles on the windowsill. A hush has settled over the ghetto, and the children, Avrom and Bina, watch the weak, flickering lights of the candle stubs. Shomer watches them too, how they struggle to survive, to hold this flickering flame. He knows that soon, no matter what he’d do, these lights will burn out and die.

But for now, he has them all, and there is no happier man alive than Shomer, that one-time purveyor of lurid tales, back when there were still rags to print such nonsense; and after the lighting and the blessing, he takes the children out for a walk. How thin they are, he marvels, watching them spin their makeshift dreidels with the other children, squatting on their haunches in the corner like born gamblers. ‘And are we not all gamblers?’ he says to Yenkl, who materialises out of the Yiddish Theatre’s door, still dressed as Kuni Leml. ‘Betting against the odds?’

And Yenkl merely nods his head, and rolls a cigarette with long thin fingers. ‘They say the trains will soon take all of us all to the east,’ he says. ‘A promised land of miracles and plenty, eh, Shomer?’

And Shomer knows the children listen, and he knows that he cannot tell them. Rumours only, whispered, of what’s happening in the east, what they do to the Jews in those camps in Poland. Rumours only, and surely there can be nothing in them, there can be no truth—

And so his mind shies from the glare of time present and travels elsewhere, to another time and place of his own making, and to a sordid little tale of shund, that is to say, of pulp—of blackmail, violence, and murder.

1.

She puffed on the cigarette with quick, nervous jerks of her hand. The fur coat she wore was mottled in places and her big, dark eyes looked at me with a sort of nervous excitement. ‘I am being blackmailed, you see, Herr Hitler.’

I hated the smell of tobacco. I hated the cold of my office, above the Jew baker’s shop. I hated London, and this cold, soulless island on which I’d found myself, a refugee. I hated what I had become.

‘It’s Wolf, now,’ I told her. ‘The name. Just Wolf.’

She shrugged. She didn’t care who or what I was.

You probably wouldn’t remember her, now. I will call her Elske Sturm, though that was not her real name, exactly. She often played the kind of girl who drowned at the end of the movie. Sometimes I wished a rain would come and drown the whole world, and everything in it. Once, I was going to conquer the world. Now I was a piece of gum stuck to a spassmacher’s shoe.

I said, ‘Blackmail, Fraulein Sturm?’

‘I have been sent pictures,’ she said. ‘Compromising photographs. The blackmailer threatens to, well, you can connect the dots.’

‘Is there any more?’ I said. There usually was.

She shrugged. It was a very Teutonic shrug. ‘The … other person in the photographs,’ she said. ‘He’s married.’

‘I see.’

‘We’re in love.’ She said it like it meant nothing, and she was right, because it never does. It was just an ugly case of adultery, the kind I wouldn’t usually touch, but I needed the money. It was December, 1937, and it was a cold winter and only going to get worse. I was behind on my rent and down on my luck, and the old wound from the concentration camp the Communists had put me in after my Fall ached in cold weather.

‘Who is the other party?’

‘I’d rather not mention his name,’ she said quickly. ‘He is a prominent politician.’

‘… I see.’ And I did. She was just an actress, and no one expects high morals from a simple bird of paradise. They were pretty and empty-headed, and dirty pictures would just as likely help their careers as ruin them. ‘… does he know?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘We haven’t spoken about it.’

She was lying, of course. She was never that good an actress. I took down the details. She had met with this man three times in different hotels around London. The blackmailer must have followed them, snapped photographs through the window of one of the rooms. I could imagine it easy enough. I said, ‘Do you have the note?’

‘Yes. Here.’ She pushed it across my desk. The message was short: Bring £300 in notes, Leave the bag by the Eleanor Cross, Sunday, 1pm, come alone, I will be watching you. No funny stuff.

‘I had to look up the Eleanor Cross,’ she said. ‘It’s that hideous monument outside Charing Cross Station.’

I nodded. I knew the place. I myself had arrived in London into that cesspit of racial impurity that was Charing Cross. It had become the gateway into London for us refugees from the Fall. The Jews and the Communists held Germany now in their filthy hands, and good, honest Volk , proud Aryans, were now the scum of Europe, beggars arriving on the filthy shores of England, cap in hand. How I hated them! How I hated them all!

‘You will make the drop? Alone?’

She bit her nails. ‘If that’s what you’d advise.’

‘It is.’

‘And you will …?’

‘I will be there. You won’t see me.’

‘I would be ever so grateful,’ she said. She shimmered over to me. She draped herself over my desk and crossed her long pale legs, one over the other. ‘I remember you from the old days,’ she said. ‘I saw you speak once, in Munich. You were so magnetic on stage. When you spoke, I really believed in you, we all did, I think. You said Germany could be great again.’ She sighed. ‘But I guess you were wrong after all.’

‘Germany was betrayed!’ I said. ‘I would have led her to victory, to, to …!’ Words failed me. She smiled at me pityingly. Her long fingers reached down and curled around my collar. Her nails were painted crimson. She was a cheap whore like all actresses are. Her perfume mixed with the smell of her cigarette as she leaned close into me. Her lips were red and ripe for the picking. ‘I would be so grateful for your efforts …’ she said.

With an effort I pushed her away. I liked my women the way I liked my dogs, vicious and submissive at once. ‘I shall see you Sunday,’ I said, coldly. ‘A retainer of five pounds would suffice, Fraulein Sturm.’

For a moment her eyes flashed; then she laughed, her tongue darting in between those white teeth of hers, as though she held me in contempt. She took the money out of her purse and laid it on my desk.

‘Is that all,’ she said.

I let it go past me. These days, I let a lot of things slide.

‘ Auf Wiedersehen ,’ I said.

She nodded, wordlessly. Then she left my office, slamming the door shut in her wake. I guess for a woman of her kind seduction was just another transaction on the balance sheet of life, like buying bread or paying off a blackmailer. I sat there for a long moment, thinking of all I had lost. Then I got up, retrieved my raincoat and my fedora, and followed her.

2.

A drunk Santa Claus bumped into me as I crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, his disgusting breath rancid on my face.

‘ Scheisse !’ I said, trying to push him off. He staggered but stood his ground, and stared at me with mean little eyes.

‘Filthy foreigners,’ he mumbled. ‘Why don’t you all just fuck off back to your own country?’

Before I could reply I saw a couple of bobbies in uniform turn and look our way.

‘Forget it,’ I said, and began to walk away. He sneered behind me.

‘Run away now, little Kraut!’ he shouted. I hated his entire race at that point. Hate was a powerful motivator, it had once made me great, and it sustained me, still. I nearly went back at him, but the bobbies were watching, and I had my job, still.

I don’t know why I was following Elske. I did not quite believe her story. I followed her to Sakall’s, near the Hippodrome, on Little Newport Street. Sakall’s was one of the fashionable new establishments, opened by a Hungarian bit part actor, and it catered to many of the performers who trod the Hippodrome’s stage. There were usually a couple of photographers stationed outside, and I recognised Hoffmann, whom I used to be friendly with back in Munich. He waved when he saw me. There was a bottle of cheap red wine by his feet, which he raised in greeting at my approach. Already, he was quite drunk.

‘Wolf,’ he said. ‘It is good to see you.’

‘Hoffmann.’

‘We have fallen on hard times, eh, my friend?’ He gave me a sardonic salute, arm extended, and chuckled. He was in his fifties and a good Aryan, and he had always served me well. ‘Yet still we carry on.’

I ignored him and his little jokes and fixed my eyes on the entrance to Sakall’s. The actress, Elske, disappeared inside. Hoffmann watched me watch her and chuckled again. ‘She’s a nice bit of totty and no mistake,’ he said.

‘Do you know who she’s meeting?’

‘Sure, sure. Some big shot out of Hollywood, one of those Warner brothers.’

‘A Jew?’

He shrugged. ‘Who isn’t a Jew, these days,’ he said.

‘Is she looking for a job?’

‘Rumour has it she’s desperate to get out. California, Wolf!’ he said. ‘Picture it, the sand beaches and the palm trees and the girls …’

‘California,’ I told him coldly, ‘is filled with dirty Jews.’

‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘But that’s show business.’

It was cold. I rubbed my hands together, stamped my feet, but it didn’t really help. I remembered the cold of the Great War, the trenches and the stench of men’s fear. It is easier to be cold when one is younger.

‘Do you know if she’s seeing anyone?’

‘Seeing?’ he said. ‘I do not know about seeing . But word is she plays footsie with half the eligible bachelors of London. And they’re not always bachelors, either, if you get my meaning.’

‘Anyone in particular?’ I said, without much interest.

He shrugged, then brightened up suddenly. ‘That young whippersnapper of yours,’ he said. ‘That Heydrich.’

‘Heydrich?’ I said. ‘ Reinhard Heydrich? Himmler’s man?’ I remembered him, vaguely. A thin faced former musician with a high pitched voice, who got kicked out of the Navy for conduct unbecoming of a gentleman. I remembered his wife better than him, Lina, a pleasant enough wench who was charmingly anti-Semitic. She almost came in her drawers every time she met me. She was the one who sent her husband for the job interview with Himmler.

‘He was in charge of intelligence, as far as I remember. He would have made a good detective if only he could keep it in his pants from time to time.’

‘Who of us can,’ Hoffmann said, philosophically.

‘But what is he doing in London? I thought the Communists had him.’

‘He got out even before the Reichstag burned,’ Hoffmann said. ‘He was always a practical man, as far as I remember.’

I could not even blame him, I realised. I had surrounded myself with ruthless, efficient men. Their loyalty was not in question—they had always been loyal first and foremost to themselves.

‘He’s got a place in town, as far as I know,’ Hoffmann said. ‘Wife and kids and all. I don’t know what he does, exactly. Something in the movies. A guy like him’s bound to land on his feet.’

I nodded, thoughtfully.

‘Thanks, Hoffmann,’ I said.

‘You going to stick around?’

‘No,’ I told him. ‘I think I saw all I needed to see.’

‘Go well, Wolf,’ he said. ‘Go in peace.’

‘We both,’ I told him, ‘know that’s unlikely.’

I could hear his chuckles all the way until I turned the corner.

3.

I headed down Charing Cross Road to the train terminus. I wanted to see the drop point for myself. The night had thickened about me and the London fog rose from the pavements and made the movements of people seem like a sort of shadow play. Hoffman used to have a studio in Munich, but when the Communists took Germany, he ran. Many of my old comrades did, escaping like rats, and now they infested this town with their presence. Passing St Martin-in-the-Fields I could hear carol singers, and a beggar shook his metal bowl at me, hoping for alms that weren’t going to come. I could hear the whistle of the trains as they crossed over the river, my native tongue being spoken, the shrill cries of a boy selling the Evening Standard, the drunken laughter of revellers at a nearby pub.

I did not see the two men in the black uniform of the British Fascists. They blended perfectly into the dark.

When I reached sight of the station I stopped and simply stared. The Eleanor Cross was surrounded by recent arrivals, all milling about like cattle. The cross, I remembered, had been erected as an act of love, one of twelve monuments King Edward had put up in memory of his late wife. I hated sentimental fools. When Geli killed herself, with my own gun, I was outraged at her betrayal. How dared she defy me in this way!

I stared at the monument, thinking. It was a nice, busy spot. Easy to disappear in a crowd. I could see why the blackmailer chose it. I decided to buy myself a cup of hot chocolate, since I had money in my pocket for once. I had always had a fondness for sweet things. I turned, which was when I saw them. There were two of them and they were ugly in that English sort of way, as though they raise the boys alongside the pigs. They wore black with the jagged lightning bolt of the British Union of Fascists on the breast, and they had bad teeth, bad breath, and nasty grins.

‘Going somewhere?’

‘Excuse me, fellows,’ I said, trying to look round them for an avenue of escape—just as the one on the right sank his fist into my stomach and knocked all the air out of me.

‘No need to apologise, old boy,’ the one on the left said pleasantly. He had a cosh in his hand.

‘No, don’t—’

It came down and connected with the back of my head. Pain exploded behind my eyes, and a million yellow stars swam in my field of vision and were replicated sixfold; but luckily I lost consciousness at that point.

4.

‘So you’re the Charlie Hunt who’s been messing with my girl,’ the man said.

‘Eh?’ I said, confused.

‘He means you’re a c—’

‘That’s enough, Reggie.’

My head felt like a football that’s been kicked round in No Man’s Land during the Christmas Truce. I looked around me, carefully. I was in a dark warehouse of some sort. On the walls I could see posters for Oswald Mosley, the Smethwick MP and leader of the BUF. He had a thin aristocratic face and a thin moustache and a ghoul’s smile. Re-Elect Mosley! said the posters.

I was bound to a chair. Standing above me were the two Fascist goons and a third man. He wore a good suit, with lightning strike cufflinks, and he looked down on me with bloodshot eyes.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ I said.

He backhanded me. My head snapped sideways and the pain burned like a flame and I thought a tooth might have come loose.

‘I’m the one asking the questions here!’ he said.

I spat out blood, just missing his shoes, and he backhanded me again.

‘What were you doing with my girl?’ he said.

‘Elske?’

‘You’re not worthy to speak her name!’

He slapped me again. I was getting tired of it. Like Germany, a man can only take so much before he must resort to violence.

I wanted very much to kill him at that moment.

His two boys stood on either side of him and looked at me with amused butcher boys’ grins.

‘Fat pigs,’ I said, and tried to spit again, but there wasn’t much in me.

‘Who are you?’ the man in the suit said.

‘Wolf,’ I said. ‘My name’s Wolf. I’m a private eye.’

‘A what?’ he said, sounding confused.

‘A P.I. A gumshoe. A shamus. A dick!’

He looked even more confused, if that were possible. They don’t breed them for intelligence, in England, so much as for a sort of bovine endurance.

‘You mean, like in Agatha Christie?’ he said.

‘No, not like fucking Agatha Christie,’ I said, though really I was secretly very fond of her books. ‘More like Sam Spade.’

‘I don’t know what in God’s name you’re talking about,’ he said, but he looked a little less mad, all of a sudden. ‘Why were you seeing Elske?’

‘She hired me,’ I said.

Understanding dawned on his face, and then something else, too, a sort of look I recognised and didn’t much like. He shook his fat finger in my face. ‘You look kind of familiar,’ he said.

‘It’s just the light,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘You look like—no, you can’t be! I thought you were dead.’

‘I get that a lot,’ I told him.

He was beaming down on me now. ‘I don’t believe it!’ he said. ‘Boys, untie our guest. I’m so sorry, Mr.—’

‘Wolf,’ I said, tiredly. ‘It’s just Wolf, now.’

‘You could have led all of Germany!’ he said.

‘I was betrayed. Germany—!’ Tears choked my voice. ‘Germany has been prostituted, and I—’

‘Take it easy, old fellow,’ he said. His boys untied me. I rubbed my arms, trying to get my circulation back. I was getting too old for this scheisse.

‘Elske told you? About the letter?’

I said, ‘So you’re the second party.’

‘I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot,’ he said. ‘I’m William Joyce.’

Now I knew why he seemed familiar. It was his voice, you could often hear it on the radio. He was the BUF’s Director of Propaganda, Mosley’s very own Joseph Goebbels. The way things were going, the British Fascists were going to win the next general election in a couple of years.

‘So you’re being blackmailed?’ I said. ‘Only Elske gave me the impression it was her that the blackmailer was targeting.’

‘Her!’ He laughed, an unsettling sound, like a gas explosion. ‘She’s an actress, and they never have any money of their own, Wolf.’

I nodded, though that was a mistake. My head felt very sore. I said, carefully, ‘So you are the party being blackmailed?’

‘Of course.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘Damned vultures. A man in my position is always in danger of being pursued. No doubt it would turn out to be a Jew behind it. Mark my words.’

‘And you intend to give Elske the money?’

He shrugged. ‘The problem with blackmailers, Wolf,’ he said sagely, ‘is that they’re never satisfied with just one drink. They have to keep milking the cow—’ and he made a rude jerking motion with his fist. Then he looked at me, with those cold, English eyes. ‘You say Elske hired you? I say good. A man of your keen analytical skills, your ruthless dedication—I couldn’t have made a better choice myself.’

He shook my hand, then patted me on the back. ‘You can make your own way back, can’t you?’ he said. He ushered me out of the room and down a corridor and out a back door and waved me goodbye cheerily enough. I found myself standing on Whitehall, outside one of those anonymous government buildings the purpose of which you never know; they could be anything, really. Big Ben was chiming the hour. It was late; I was cold; my head hurt diabolically. And a passing dog, stopping to sniff me, took a shit on my shoes before running off.

So I went home.

5.

Several things were obvious to me. That I was being played, was one. That the players themselves were being played was another. It had sounded like just a little dirty bit of blackmail to begin with, but things are seldom this simple in real life.

‘So you see?’ I told Martha. ‘It all makes perfect sense, in a way, don’t you think?’

She glared at me, then farted. I was shaving in the shared bathroom in the hall and she was waiting for me to finish, with arms crossed, growing visibly impatient. She was a corpulent old crone who sold poisoned seeds for passers-by to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. I quite liked the old mass-murdering bitch. In a way, she was the only friend I had in this world.

‘You think this Heydrich guy is blackmailing this William Joyce guy?’ she said.

‘Exactly.’

‘And you think Joyce sent this Elske woman to hire you, and then had you kidnapped?’

‘Exactly!’ I said. ‘It’s the old carrot and stick. He must be really worried about it, under all that bluster. Do this and I reward you, don’t do this and …’ I rubbed my head, where a sore bruise still very much lingered. ‘You get the picture.’

‘I don’t get shit,’ she said. ‘Are you finished in there?’

‘I’m shaving,’ I said. I touched my upper lip, tenderly. I used to have a moustache, but it was gone, now. I still missed it, sometimes. But it belonged in the past.

‘Listen, Wolfy,’ she said. ‘Old Martha really needs to have a shit, and soon.’ She farted again and then laughed delightedly. ‘You shave like a prostitute,’ she said.

‘Listen to me, you disgusting old bat!’ I screamed, waving my safety razor threateningly at her. ‘You don’t seem to see the bigger picture here!’

‘Ah oh,’ she said. She clutched her stomach and pushed past me into the bathroom despite my protestations, and before I could do anything to stop her she dropped her drawers and sat down on the toilet and I heard a vile, awful sound as she emptied her bowels. As the smell threatened to choke me, I tactically withdrew into the corridor, still holding the useless razor in my hand. Martha looked up at me and smiled dreamily. ‘I’m sure it will all work out, Wolf. It sounds like you have everything very much in hand.’

6.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, on a cold and miserable December just shy of Christmas Eve. I couldn’t care less about Santa Claus, and the only Rudolf I knew was Hess. I wore my old rain mac and my beat up fedora, and the shoes the dog had taken a shit on. I had a bump on my head, a Luger in my coat, and a heartfelt desire to be elsewhere. I was everything a private detective ought to be. I was looking after three hundred pounds.

Charing Cross Station was crowded by the time I got there. The trains were pulling in from Dover, and they dislodged their cargo of refugees at the platforms, so that the poor fools, the remains of their former lives bundled into cheap suitcases, stood blinking in the weak English light and wondered what the hell they were doing here. There is nothing worse than the daylight in England, it turns everyone into ghosts.

Policemen moved among the throngs, keeping an eye out for pickpockets and breaking fights. Relatives waiting anxiously scanned the oncoming faces for long lost loved ones and, when found, engaged in a human orgy of celebration that I found distasteful. This was the great rabble of Europe, fleeing the Communists. I loathed them, I would have exterminated them all if only I could.

The whole place was in chaos. I thought I saw the two Fascists who were in Joyce’s employ, but it was impossible to keep track of anything or anyone. Elske pushed through the crowds, carrying the money, dressed anonymously enough that no one thought to associate her with the glamorous figure she presented on screen. Carol singers mingled with a variety of Father Christmases and cab drivers and staggering drunks from the nearby pubs. I lost sight of Elske just as she was standing by the monument, and only for a moment. I pushed through the crowds towards her and when it parted I saw that the satchel she had carried was gone.

7.

For a moment, I panicked. Then I caught sight of him, moving away with a sort of smooth certainty that made the crowd flow around him like water. He was dressed in red and white, but he wasn’t fat, not at all. He was a blade of a man and for a moment he turned his head and looked back, and our eyes met.

Recognition flared in his eyes, and with it came a sardonic smile. Then he pushed through the throngs, away from the station and onto the Strand, and I lost sight of him. I gave chase, shouting at the people to move out of my way, cursing as they shuffled and stood their ground like the livestock that they were. Nevertheless I gained ground and, emerging onto the busy street near Coutts Bank, I caught sight of him again, hurrying with long, assured strides past the British Medical Association Building. I ran, passed the Adelphi, and saw him turn unhurriedly to enter the Savoy on the other side of the street.

‘Reinhard!’ I yelled. ‘Reinhard, damn it!’

I pulled out my gun. I do not know what I would have done, whether I’d had shot him. It made no difference, in the end.

He turned at the sound of my voice. Again that smile briefly illuminated his face, cold and mocking. I couldn’t see the satchel. He began to raise his arm, perhaps in greeting, perhaps in a mocking salute of the kind they used to give me.

The car came out of nowhere.

It was a sleek black Daimler with its headlights shining through the fog. It hit Reinhard Heydrich’s body with a sickening crunch and didn’t stop. His body rolled and the car drove over it and sped away in the direction we’d just come from. I ran across to him. He lay there on the dirty ground, in the sludgy grey-white snow. His blood was very red under the street lights.

He tried to smile.

‘Wolf,’ he said. ‘It has been … a while.’

‘I thought you had more sense than that,’ I told him.

‘It was just a … bit of blackmail,’ he said. ‘She put me up to it, you know.’

‘Elske? Yes, I figured as much.’

‘She was … good in the sack.’ He coughed, and blood came gurgling out of his mouth, staining his white teeth. ‘I guess she … played me for a fool.’

I didn’t know what to tell him. That this wasn’t how it was meant to end? Heydrich was a rat, and he’d been killed like a rodent, and it was nothing more than he deserved, perhaps than any of us deserve, if you come down to it. I watched him die. He died well, I’ll give him that. I searched his body, quickly.

Then I got out of there before the police came.

8.

There was a small Christmas tree on Berwick Street visible from my office; its lights illuminated the whores who congregated on that side of the street and threw elongated, talon-like shadows over the furtive punters. On the other end of the road there were children, squatting by the corner, gambling over the outcome of a spinning top. I hated them all.

Her perfume preceded her into my office. She stood in the doorway and surveyed the room and then lit up a cigarette.

‘It’s terrible,’ she said. ‘What happened.’

‘Fraulein Sturm.’

‘Poor Heydrich. I never suspected—’

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘William was most grateful for your services,’ she said. She reached into her handbag and came out with a handful of notes and passed them to me. I had no choice. I took them.

‘He is a very important man, you know,’ she said. ‘They say Sir Oswald will become prime minister in the next elections, and William is going to be his right-hand man. He thinks the world of you, you know. You were always such an inspiration for their cause.’

‘The money,’ I said, ignoring her prattling. ‘It wasn’t on him.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The pay-off. It was missing.’

She shrugged. ‘He must have hidden it somewhere.’

‘Perhaps.’ I noticed, behind her in the corridor, a packed suitcase. ‘Going someplace, Fraulein?’

‘Los Angeles,’ she said. ‘The ship sails tomorrow morning. I am just on my way to the train station.’ She smiled at me round her cigarette. ‘I’ve been offered a contract with one of the movie studios.’

‘You would work for Jews?’ I said.

‘A girl’s gotta eat.’

‘Your earrings,’ I said. ‘Are they new? They look expensive.’

She laughed, gaily. ‘I treated myself,’ she said, with no self-consciousness. ‘I must look my best, for the photographers.’

‘Of course.’

When she left I stared at the money she’d left me. I knew she’d used Heinrich to blackmail Joyce, and that, having got her hands on the money she needed, manipulated Joyce into eliminating Heydrich. I felt a grudging admiration for her. She was cool as Andersen’s Snow Queen, as nasty as a national socialist. A woman like that, I thought, could go far in show business.

Then I slid out the envelope that’s been sitting in my drawer. The ever-helpful Hoffmann had developed the negatives for me, the ones I had taken off of Heydrich’s corpse. I looked at the photos dispassionately. The naked couple portrayed in them was captured in stark relief, entwined in a variety of poses. As a study in animal reproduction they would have made for excellent woodcuts.

I tapped my fingers on the desk. A thought slowly stole into my head. It was a cold December, and it was only going to get colder. And as Elske had so eloquently put it, a girl’s gotta eat.

I took a sheet of blank paper, picked up a pen and, slowly, I began to write.

You killed the wrong man. I have the negatives. Bring £500. Come alone. I will be watching you …

I stared at the note for a while, then added, in a postscript, No funny stuff.

When I raised my head it had begun to snow outside the window; the snow fell in delicate shivers on the hard cold ground, and in the distance the bells began to toll. I rubbed my hands together to keep them warm. Old Martha stuck her head through the door and hiccupped. She was quite intoxicated. ‘Fancy a drink, Wolfy?’ she said.

‘I don’t drink,’ I told her.

‘Oh, come on,’ she said, ‘it’s the holidays.’

She disappeared and I could hear her heavy steps going back to her room. I was so cold, and it was going to be a cold winter. After a moment I got up, folded the note neatly and placed it in an envelope. I would mail it tomorrow, I thought. I put it in my coat pocket and left the office and went and knocked on Martha’s door.

‘Come in,’ she purred.

I sighed and went inside. She was sprawled in her armchair, covered in a dirty blanket, with half a bottle of gin in her hand.

She raised it in salute as I sat down.

‘Merry Christmas, Wolf,’ she said.

§

In another time and place, Shomer watches the children. It begins to snow, then, a beautiful, clean phenomenon, and the children run and laugh in the ghetto streets, and later play at being snow angels. He worries how to keep them warm, he worries if they’ll have food enough to eat, this winter, and he’s inexplicably fearful of trains, the trains that depart full from the Umschlagplatz, but always return empty.

He would do anything to keep them safe, to keep them warm, he would do anything to hear their laughter: but he also knows that while one may find an escape in What-Ifs, in flights of fancy, such an escape is only possible in one’s imagination. Ultimately, he thinks, though it breaks his heart, all such fantasy is futile.

But for now, they are here, they are together, on this night of Hannukah. When they return home, the candles have burned out, and everywhere it is dark. He puts the children to bed, and covers them, and sits with them as they fall asleep. His wife comes and sits with him, and he holds her hand.

‘Oh, Fanya,’ he says. ‘Fanya, they’re so beautiful!’

Words from the Editor–in–Chief

by Jason Sizemore | 341 words

Welcome to issue 91 of Apex Magazine !

We have a bunch of entertainment to offer this month, but first I want to address the orange elephant in the room: the results of the United States’ presidential election.

In general, I dislike discussing politics. I find that people—both friends and strangers—become … impolite when it comes to political discourse. However, the election of Donald Trump has created a swell of stress, fear, and terror in too many people I care about. Because of this, I feel it is important to state my—and in conjunction Apex’s—stance. Whether you voted for Trump or not, I will consider you an asshole or, at minimum, someone lacking a modicum of empathy if you dismiss the concerns of so many as unfounded and whiny.

Relating to that, today I saw a meme on Facebook that reads:

First they came for the Muslims and we said “not this time, motherfucker.”

Allow me to amplify that statement. NOT THIS TIME, MOTHERFUCKER.

Apex Magazine raises its voice in support of this country’s marginalized people.

§

Now on to the issue!

Issue 91 closes the year with some compelling and powerful original fiction by Lavie Tidhar (“Red Christmas”), K.T. Bryski (“The Love It Bears Fair Maidens”), and Helen Stubbs (“Uncontainable”). These stories are different from one another in terms of subject, tone, and pacing, but they are all stories I feel will inspire some interesting conversations.

Our nonfiction offerings this month is loaded with interviews of author Helen Stubbs and cover artist Billy Nuñez, a reprint of Keffy R.M. Kehrli’s Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling essay ‘Tropes as Erasers,” managing editor Lesley Conner’s behind the curtains reveal of how she selects cover art, and a feature on the short film I Remember the Future based on Michael A. Burstein’s story of the same name.

Finally, our reprint this month is Burstein’s hopeful Nebula Award-nominated ‘I Remember the Future.” Not only does it compliment the feature on the short film in this issue, but 2016 has been a tough year for many, so I feel it is appropriate that we close it out with a little light.

Jason Sizemore

Editor-in-Chief