Xenocultivars: Stories of Queer Growth

Copyright © 2022 by Speculatively Queer, LLC

All rights reserved

Cover art and design © 2022 by Laya Rose

Typeset by Ryan Vance

Seedlings © 2018 by Audrey R. Hollis, first published in Strange Horizons

A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting © 2017 by Charles Payseur, first published in Flash Fiction Online

All other stories © 2022 by the authors

First Printing: January 2022

Printed in the United States

ISBN: 978-1-7366182-3-3

Published by Speculatively Queer

Seattle, Washington

www.speculativelyqueer.com

Edited by
Isabela Oliveira and Jed Sabin

Dedicated to the sturdiest petals

and to the most delicate of trunks.

Introduction

by Isabela Oliveira and Jed Sabin

You can’t tell plants what to do. A plant might decide to lean to the left one day, or spread out much wider than the salesperson at the garden center said it would, or survive a winter that should have been too harsh, or grow one leaf three times the size of the rest for no discernible reason. They can be influenced with the right tools and conditions, but they don’t take orders. They grow as they please.

Growth is part of the joy of being queer, and it looks different for everyone. Our awareness of ourselves can grow, as can our identities, and our relationship with being perceived as queer; some grow to embrace and claim their true self, and some grow from one true self into another and another throughout their lives.

This collection of speculative short fiction is about all kinds of queer growth, from emerging and developing to flourishing and cultivating. Whether they’re tender sprouts just beginning to discover themselves or deeply-rooted leaders fiercely defending those they love, the people in these stories have this in common: you can’t tell them what to do. They grow as they please.

Content Notes

The Aloe’s Bargain

Julian Stuart

The plant says, [Hello.]

Vera knows better than to tell anyone this. She knows a lot of things nobody wants to hear, and they tell her so. But that doesn’t make them not true. She is six years old, and she is a girl, and her name is Vera (which is the most beautiful name in the world, a name for princesses and glamorous ladies), and she put her soft little hand on the plastic of the pot because she wanted to feel its sun-warmed smoothness and this plant said hello.

Oma heads toward the flats of nasturtiums, but Vera trails farther behind to look closer. Her eyes focus on the plastic tag sprouting from the pot next to the small shock of sturdy green leaves, just slightly larger than her hand.

Slowly, her mouth makes the shapes of Aloe barbadensis. It reminds her of the Barbie dolls the girls at school have, which she is not supposed to want. And then in parentheses, in small print: (Aloe Vera).

She wonders what it means that the plant with her name has another name too, like her. She wonders which one it likes best.

Next to it is one with differently-shaped leaves, Aloe... something else, a long name that she doesn’t know how to read; and then another one, the same shape as the Aloe Vera but a dark red. She likes them too, but not as much.

Her hand brushes the pot again.

[Yes,] says the plant.

It costs five dollars. She knows she has five dollars in her piggy bank at home. And it has her name. And it said hello.

Oma turns back and huffs, in that way that she does so much when Vera is there. “Keep up,” she says, not unkindly but not expecting disagreement. “Or I’ll lose you, and then you’ll have to live with the plants.”

Vera thinks about that. She wouldn’t mind being a plant, but she wouldn’t like to eat dirt. And the water from the gardeners’ hoses is cold when it spatters her arms.

“Oma,” she says, gathering all her courage and her words, as slippery as they are. “Can — may I. May I. Have a plant. This one. Please. I have the money at home.”

She doesn’t say, It has my name. Oma wouldn’t like that. But she thinks it very hard.

Oma looks at Vera, and then at the plant. “An aloe,” she says. “You would water it too much, child.”

“I wouldn’t,” Vera says desperately. “Please?”

Oma sighs. “Well, they’re good to have around. All right. Put it in the basket.” She holds out the basket hanging off her forearm. But Vera pulls the plant off its spot on the shelf and carefully hugs it to her chest. It’s hers. She’ll carry it.

[Yes,] says the plant.

* * *

The aloe sits up on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. After a few weeks, Vera’s mother complains about the ugly black pot in her pristine white kitchen, so Vera and Oma go to the garden centre and pick out a nicer one to cover the plastic. It’s white ceramic with blue and orange dots, like a sweater the plant can slip into.

It stays there, in its sweater, slowly growing larger. Every Sunday Vera clambers up on the step stool, diligently pours half a tumbler of fresh cold water onto the dirt, and listens to the plant hum in gratitude. It sounds a little like a very small motor, and when she is alone she tries to make the sound in her small chest. It’s not the same, but it’s something like it.

When the sunbeams come through the window, the hum is loud enough to hear from the kitchen doorway, louder than the faint electrical shriek of the wires in the walls — another thing Vera has learned not to tell anyone about. She loves the plant even more for drowning out the wires.

One Sunday she is perched gingerly on the step stool with her cup of water while Oma stirs a pot of boiling potatoes and pretends she isn’t watching. Vera gently strokes the smooth skin of the largest leaf, avoiding the blunt spines on the edges. It feels like her own skin, yielding and soft, and the plant is burbling happily at Vera as she pets it. [Yes,] it says. [Yes, yes.]

It doesn’t know many words. It has learned some, from Vera whispering. Today it sends her the noise of her small footsteps, and a feeling, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

“Friend,” Vera whispers.

“Don’t talk to the plant,” Oma says, from the stove.

“You do,” Vera says, although her cheeks go hot. “You talk to the garden. You tell it to grow. I want my plant to grow.”

Oma tsks. “That’s different.”

[Friend,] the plant says, under her fingertips. The sunshine feeling gets warmer.

Vera focuses deeply on the vivid green of the leaf, dotted with pale spots. It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.

“Love,” she whispers to the sunshine feeling.

Oma says something behind her, but Vera doesn’t hear. All she hears is the aloe, thrumming louder and louder: [Yes. Love.]

Then there is a bump at her hip, and she wobbles, and a sudden cloud of steam obscures her vision and something sears over her outflung hand.

It hurts, it hurts. Her whole world narrows to that bright-crimson place as sharp as a hundred knives, and she screams. The pot of potatoes clatters into the sink. Hot steam wafts over the burn again, like a licking flame. 

Oma’s hands are strong, and steady, and fast; they grab Vera and keep her from falling. She buries her face in Oma’s shoulder and wails. Oma mutters something, half comfort and half reprimand, but Vera doesn’t process it.

And then, from behind her: a high and wordless scream, smaller and shriller than her own. It is brief. It leaves behind it a silence filled with questions.

Something cool, wet, drippingly juicy, touches Vera’s outraged hand. The pain is immediately muted.

She sniffles hard, scrubs her uninjured hand roughly over her eyes, and looks.

There is an aloe leaf, split hastily down the middle, pasted to the burn on her hand. Uncomprehending, she looks over her shoulder at her plant.

The leaf she was petting, the biggest and juiciest, is gone. Where it was, there is only an oozing stub.

Where the thrum was, in her chest, there is silence.

She bursts into tears.

In her room, out of the way, she cries as the split leaf withers on her hand. Oma comes to fetch her for dinner, and under the brighter lights in the kitchen she peels the limp plant flesh away, inspecting Vera’s hand from all angles.

“It will be fine,” she pronounces eventually.

Vera doesn’t feel fine at all.

“Oma,” she quavers, “why did you cut my plant?” 

Her grandmother blinks at her. “It’s an aloe,” she says. “That’s what they’re for. They’re good for burns, they help you heal faster. What did you think I kept it for?”

“Oh,” Vera says.

She doesn’t say, It’s mine.

She doesn’t say, It’s my friend.

She doesn’t say, I love it and it loves me back.

She looks at the strip of wilted leaf in her grandmother’s fingers and then down at the pinkened stripe on her hand, half as raw as it was.

It helped her.

“Don’t worry,” Oma says. “It doesn’t kill the plant. Now come eat.”

As Vera eats her mashed potatoes, she glances again and again at the windowsill, and at the silent plant. 

After she’s finished helping with the dishes, she lingers by the sink, damp dish towel twisted between her small fists. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry I took your leaf. I didn’t mean to.”

Vera knows better than to go and get out the step stool, but she stretches as far as she can, and her fingertips just brush the base of the pot.

[Love?]

The plant is quiet, but it is there, solid like always.

“Love,” Vera whispers, and her heart twists like the dish towel. “I’m sorry.”

[Grow.] The plant sends her the feeling of new leaves pushing up and apart, from deep within its core. [Grow. Yes.] And then a slice of her Oma’s voice: [“That’s what they’re for.”]

She stares at the stub of the most perfect leaf, beginning to become leathery and scabbed now, and nods slowly. Reluctantly. Remembering how it screamed. 

“Love,” she whispers again. “I’ll be more careful.”

[Love,] the aloe hums.

The burn heals without a mark. But although Vera wishes as hard as she can, and new leaves do come in time, the perfect leaf stays a brown and withered stub.

* * *

The aloe grows, and so does Vera.

[Don’t fit,] it tells her one afternoon. It is larger than its pot now, on all sides. She can reach it easily now without the step stool, which is the best thing about how the last few years have changed her. She, too, is bigger on all sides. She doesn’t mind it inherently, but she doesn’t like hearing the comments from her classmates that make it harder to pretend to be a dainty and glamorous queen.

“I know how you feel,” Vera tells it wearily. “But we can get you a new container.”

It stretches in a way that makes it look like a small, lazy octopus. [Big.]

“Yeah,” she agrees. “You need space.”

From her allowance, she buys it a new pot twice the size, and a pretty container painted like Delft china in whites and blues. At the kitchen table, in a riot of dirt that her mother theatrically disapproves of, Vera turns the aloe out of its pot and teases apart the snarls of strong white roots that have bent themselves into the shape of the plastic.

[Tickle,] the plant says, but it’s humming happily. Vera wiggles her fingers a little deeper into the roots and the aloe sends her a moment of her own laugh, high and bubbly.

[Big, big big big,] it chants. [Grow grow grow. Grow tall, grow tall.]

She lifts it up, remembering how small her hands used to look, remembering the weight of the aloe feeling so much more considerable, and tucks it into the new soil.

[Ahhh,] the plant says, relaxing visibly. [Good. Love. Now you.]

“Now me?” She raises an eyebrow at the plant. “It’s not that easy.”

[Easy,] the plant insists. [You big. You grow. Tall. Strong. Fat.]

It doesn’t sound the way her classmates say it, the way her mother says it, the way her doctor says it. The way she says it when she wants to explain to herself why they hate her.

She has never said it to the aloe that way. She loves the pudgy fleshiness of its leaves, so solid, so healthy.

[You need space. Grow more.] The plant beams sunlight and approval at her. [Big. Tall. Full of juice, like me. Full of love.]

“Like you,” she murmurs.

[Like me.]

She looks down at the curve of her belly and the softness of her arms, and tries to see herself deep green and mottled with pale dots. She imagines her own growth as a sign that she is becoming stronger and more filled with power.

She squeezes the base of a leaf gently, and then pinches her forearm.

“Juicy,” she says, testing it out. “Like you.”

[You get big. Good good. Proud.]

Her whole chest feels warm and full of thrumming. “I’m proud of you too,” she says, and pats the dirt around the base of the aloe’s stem just enough to make sure it’s stable.

* * *

She does get big, and tall, and she stays fat, and the aloe does the same. At the secondhand shop she finds it an even larger pot — and herself a flower-patterned dress that skims the edges of her hips instead of digging in like her jeans do. She is only brave enough to wear it when she’s home alone, but she puts it on and twirls for the plant. It is delighted, and talks about flowers for days. She feels like a queen again.

It no longer fits on the windowsill, and its leaves spread out so much that she has to take it out of the kitchen and up to her room. She misses it when she’s making dinner and washing up, but it sings to her while she does her homework, and she dreams of warm rocks and sunshine and hundreds and hundreds of aloes.

She wonders if it would like to have friends. She wishes she had any. There’s Bayley, who is in her history and English classes, and has the most amazingly fluffy curly hair, and actually picked Vera for a team project — but that’s not quite being friends, really. That’s just being classmates. Even if Bayley did ask about the plants Vera was doodling on her papers, and actually listened when Vera explained that it was a sempervivum, which means “lives forever,” and how you can grow one from a single leaf if you’re patient with it. She thinks about the curiosity in Bayley’s dark eyes, sometimes. It might be nice to have a friend like that.

Maybe the aloe doesn’t want to be alone either. In the old pots, Vera starts new succulents from the garden centre — a sedum with bright glossy jellybean leaves, and a kalanchoe like a stack of edgewise mint candy melts. Then more sedums, and an armour-plated haworthia, and an echeveria she can’t touch without leaving fingerprints on its waxy coating. They don’t talk to her, which is a little disappointing; but the aloe adopts them like a hen taking on a flock of ducklings, and sings songs to them, and they grow.

Bayley passes Vera a note in English class: We should work on the Shakespeare project this weekend. Your place?

On the corner of the page, Bayley has drawn a sempervivum.

Vera swallows something large and unexpected, and meets Bayley’s eyes long enough to nod.

* * *

“Wow,” Bayley breathes, two steps into Vera’s room. “You grew those?”

Vera nods. She’s never had anyone in her room before besides family, and Bayley being in her space fills her with a strange electricity, jittery but thrilling.

“You’re really good at plants,” Bayley says. “I can never keep them alive.”

Vera doesn’t know how to be admired.

“It’s easy,” she says, hating how awkward she sounds. “You just have to know what they need.”

Bayley drifts toward the window, as if pulled on an invisible string. Her sea-green sweatshirt, her favourite, matches the kalanchoe, but it’s the aloe she’s staring at. “This is the biggest aloe I’ve ever seen. How long have you been growing it?”

“Since I was little. Six.” Her words line up almost without her meaning to say them. “It’s my favourite. Because of the name. Vera.”

Bayley smiles. “It’s a pretty name.”

“I.” Vera blushes and doesn’t know why. She hasn’t told Bayley it’s her name. But something clenched inside her relaxes all the same. “...Thanks.”

“Can I touch it?” Bayley hovers a hand an inch from the leaves, looking back at Vera, waiting. Bayley always asks about things.

“Just watch for the spikes,” Vera says.

Bayley pets the aloe with one fingertip, the way Vera does, and then grins brilliantly. “Cool.”

[Friend,] the aloe carols.

Vera smiles, because she can’t help herself.

She thinks it might be right.

* * *

They get an A on the Shakespeare project. Bayley starts asking about the aloe and the other plants, the way she might ask about someone’s dog. Vera grabs hold of a whole lot of courage and tells her she can come over and see them, if she wants. Anytime she wants.

Vera’s mother doesn’t seem to know what to do with Vera having a friend, and defaults to wary disapproval. Bayley, though, has manners like a perfect lady. She knows to always leave loudly and cheerfully, well before dinner, so that Vera’s mother never has to do the math of an extra mouth to feed; and she knows that she doesn’t have to be so loud and cheerful with Vera, who is quiet by nature. Vera thinks Bayley is good at seeing things, and knowing the truth of them.

One afternoon Vera’s closet is open when they come in from school, and although they sit straight down on the floor and start on their homework like normal, Bayley is a little extra quiet, like she’s waiting for Vera to say something.

“Do you like dresses?” she asks eventually.

Part of Vera wants to freeze. The hem of her flowered dress with the twirly skirt is sticking out from her everyday clothes, her shirts and jeans, and for a moment it feels like the only thing in the room.

But it’s Bayley, and her eyes are so kind, and her sweet dark face is soft and open and listening.

Vera says carefully, “Is it okay? If I do?”

“My oldest sister has some she’s getting rid of.” Bayley smiles. “She loves flower prints too. Should I bring them over to see if they fit?”

Vera wonders what else there is of her that Bayley has seen, and decided to like.

Still, she hesitates. “Wouldn’t one of your other sisters want them?”

“Nah. Tasha doesn’t like dresses, and Mari only wears black right now.” Bayley crinkles up her nose. “Besides, Annie would be happy to know that someone has them who wants them.”

“She doesn’t know... me.” Vera lets that stand in for everything else Annie doesn’t know.

“But I do,” Bayley says solidly. “That means you count as part of the family. And we take care of our family.” 

Vera blinks at her. She has no idea what to do with that.

“It’s like your aloe.” Bayley lies back on the carpet and waves her hands as she talks. “You take care of it, so it takes care of you, right? That’s how it works. You’re a team.”

The aloe, which has been humming quietly, sends Vera a patch of sunshine-feeling.

“Like you and me,” Bayley says, and pokes Vera’s knee, and grins.

Vera wants to echo it back, and make it sound as true as it is, as it has to be, as she needs it to be — but her words have gone somewhere. Instead, mustering what feels like truly immense daring, she pokes Bayley’s shoulder.

Bayley laughs, and the aloe thrums, and the sunshine-feeling grows until it seems to fill the whole room.

* * *

After that it’s easier to talk, and they talk like they’ll never stop, all day — about their families, and their lives, and their dreams. Bayley has dreams bigger than Vera’s have been able to grow.

“I wanna get a job as soon as I can,” she says one afternoon. “Now that Annie is going to college, I gotta help Dad out with money. Wouldn’t it be great if the coffee shop would hire me? They love me there.”

“Everyone loves you,” Vera says, very quietly.

Bayley bumps Vera’s shoulder with hers, and then leans her weight against Vera. “You could come visit me, if I worked there. It’s only two blocks over. I’d make you free drinks.”

Vera nods, but she isn’t sure — once in a while they stop in on their way to Vera’s house, and although she loves how the silly names of the drinks make Bayley smile, everything is so loud in there, so loud that Vera can’t speak in whole sentences or hold a thought in her head. She can’t imagine relaxing there, let alone doing homework, even if Bayley could somehow sneak her the drinks she can’t afford.

Still, Bayley is determined. She counts down the days until she’s old enough to apply, and of course, of course, with her bright smile and all her enthusiasm, they hire her immediately.

After her first day, Bayley comes over with her brand-new apron and cap and twirls in them, like Vera does in her dress, and Vera is overwhelmed with pride. But when Bayley leaves, Vera sits on the floor with her back against the wall, next to her aloe, now just overwhelmed. She wants to cry.

She can’t follow Bayley to this job. She can’t. Bayley will do this without her.

This is just the first of so many things that Bayley will do without her. And this should be okay, this has to be okay, Bayley is helping her family and making her own way in the world and doing a thing she is so happy to do.

But nothing has ever felt less okay to Vera than looking at the length of her life and realising how much of it she will spend alone, in a space where Bayley is not.

[Love,] the aloe hums at her.

She looks up at it, and the tears spill over.

[Hurt?] The plant stretches a leaf out in alarm.

“Kinda,” she whispers.

[You take,] the plant says, and pushes the leaf against her cheek. [I help. “That’s what they’re for.”]

“Not that kind of hurt.” Vera wipes a hand across her eyes. “It’s inside of me.”

[Take,] the plant insists. [Eat. Help your inside.]

“I can’t do that.” She stares at the plant, still stretching toward her. It is so confident. She doesn’t know how to tell it that it doesn’t understand. And she hasn’t cut a healthy leaf off it since —

— the way it screamed —

She shakes her head, to clear the memory, and also because no. “I won’t hurt you just because I’m sad.”

[Not hurt,] the aloe says firmly. [Not hurt. It good. Love. You take.]

She chews on her lower lip for a moment. She doesn’t deserve — doesn’t need a whole leaf, not for herself, not for this. It’s wasteful. She should save them for when it matters more. But Vera knows the plant is stubborn.

Her sharpest pair of scissors is in her desk. Reluctantly, she gets them out, kneels next to the aloe, and finds a shorter leaf, an older one, lower down on the thick, strong stem. She will have to prune this leaf in a few months anyway, she rationalises. Still, she asks the aloe, “Are you sure?” Maybe, if she gives it one more chance, it will say no.

It sends her the feeling of cool water on a burn. [Take.] And then Bayley’s voice: [“You’re a team. Like you and me.”]

Vera holds her breath, and snips; a two-inch chunk of the leaf tumbles into her open palm. The plant goes very still, but it does not scream.

[Have,] it says. [It good. Help your hurt. Full of love.]

Cautiously, Vera licks the cut end of the leaf. It tastes like water, and green plant matter, and something a little tiny bit bitter and a little tiny bit sweet.

[Love is to give,] the plant says, and Vera sucks on the juice that oozes from the leaf tip, and lets the aloe love her the best way it knows how, and tries to feel better.

* * *

On the increasingly precious afternoons when Bayley can still come over, it’s the two of them and their homework and the plants, just like it used to be. But more often now Bayley has shifts, because she is working so hard, and Vera is alone with the plants.

At the secondhand shop, Vera finds a sea-green teacup with just a tiny chip in its rim. Bayley’s favourite colour.

She fills it with potting mix and looks over all of her plants. The echeveria has little rosettes on its main stem, with roots already growing from their bases. Bayley has her latest schedule, and she won’t be coming over for at least a week. If Vera does it tonight, the echeveria cutting should be settled enough for Bayley to take it with her.

“So you have one of your own,” Vera practises saying, until it sounds casual and not quite so much like so you’ll think about us.

[You give aloe,] the aloe suggests, a little arrogantly. [Is better.]

Vera strokes one of its leaves. “You don’t have any pups, how would I do that?”

The plant is adamant. [I have. For give.]

“All right. When you do.” She settles next to it, and pulls out her math textbook.

The plant is thinking about dozens of tiny aloes surrounding it, and Vera lets that unfold through her head while she tries to solve equations. Add, and multiply, and set out in balance —

There is a loud thump at the front door, and the numbers vanish from Vera’s head.

Bayley is on the front stoop, leaning on the doorframe, cap askew and hair in disarray, hunched over herself. She is sobbing in a way that Vera feels in her bones, because Bayley is trying not to make any sound.

“What happened?” Vera asks; there is nothing that matters but that.

Bayley uncurls herself and Vera sees her hands, her careful, clever hands: splotched with burns, raw and pink and oozing.

Upstairs, the aloe shrills alarm.

Bayley is telling her about a customer, and a fresh pot of hot tea, and it wasn’t a mistake but maybe the mistake had been Bayley serving it, but for once Vera isn’t listening to every word she says. She is guiding Bayley up to her room, where the aloe is keening like a siren, [here here here here here!], and her head is full of the inevitable weight of what she must do — the only right thing to do, a rightness that drives out all questions.

As her fingers touch the first leaf, the plant says, [Yes. Take. Help. Take care.]

“Thank you,” she whispers to it, and: “I’m sorry.”

[No sorry,] the plant says, as she cuts the leaf. [Take. Must. Love.]

“I love you,” she whispers, as she takes the second leaf, and the third. “I love you. I love you.”

[Love,] the plant hums, solid and unwavering. [Love her too.] Then it falls silent.

She does not stop until all of Bayley’s hands and forearms are wrapped in green, with friendly white freckles.

Only then does she look up at Bayley’s face. Bayley’s eyes are red and swollen, and as they meet Vera’s, they brim again and spill over. “Oh my God, your aloe.”

There are five leaves left at the top of the stalk. The rest is bare.

“It’s okay,” Vera says, and finds, somehow, impossibly, that she means it.

She pulls Bayley against the soft roundness of her own body, imagining it too as green and freckled and full of healing.

“Will it... grow back?” Bayley sniffles, and leans into Vera, her hands held awkwardly out in front of her.

“Let’s just sit, for a minute,” Vera says.

They sit on the bed, and she holds Bayley against her side, until Bayley relaxes and the adrenaline and fear drains out of her. Vera thinks very hard about the juice of the aloe, collected over so many years of water and sun and soil and care, soaking into the raw places on Bayley’s skin; how the love it holds is cooling the blisters and soothing the pain.

She lets the love that she holds soak into Bayley, too. In her heart, she knows: it is what she is for.

* * *

Bayley, exhausted from crying, falls asleep on Vera’s bed, with the leaves still clinging gamely to her arms to give all the help they can. In the quiet, Vera pulls the aloe pot into her lap and stares at the stem, hopelessly top-heavy and jagged with stubs of leaf left behind in her haste. There’s not much more of it now than there was when she first picked it up.

Carefully, she peels a few of the leaf stubs away, and picks up her secateurs.

[Love,] the plant says, its voice tiny and weary. [You fix.]

Its faith in her, after all this, makes her throat feel tight. She bites her lower lip and slices through the stem, two or three inches below the lowest remaining leaf.

The aloe does not yelp. It is silent for a moment, and then says, [Small.]

“We’ll make you big again,” Vera whispers. She sets the cut end on top of the soil, not tucking it in yet — it will need time to callus over — and gently tugs on the headless stem.

From the soil at its base, a flash of green.

Her fingers make it look so small, hardly big enough to be its own plant. But it is there: under the earth, where nobody could see, the aloe has made a pup.

Behind her, Bayley stirs.

Vera teases the pup out of the soil, and takes Bayley’s hand, so carefully, and says, “Look what I found.”

She places the pup in Bayley’s palm.

The pup says, [Hello.]

Bayley looks at Vera with wide eyes full of shock and sudden understanding, and the rootless aloe in its pot gives a quiet, satisfied hum; and like a blossom unfolding, Vera sees spreading out before her all the ways they will grow together, larger and stronger, reaching toward the sun.

Julian Stuart is, according to a wide variety of sources, a writer. They were raised in Canada and exported for the Australian market. They live mostly in front of a keyboard, and enjoy black tea, starlight, absurdism, sus2 chords, old book smell, and the word ‘quirk’. As well as dozens of other succulents, they have an aloe plant named George. He is in his teens and very dramatic, and they love him dearly. You can find more of Julian’s words at Fireside Fiction and Ghost Orchid Press, at paintbyletters.com, and on Twitter @mine_de_rien (where they sometimes post plant pictures).

Content Notes

This Story is Called “The Transformation of Things”

P.H. Lee

Once upon a time there was a tree that yearned to become some other thing, some particular thing that it could not put a name to. It turned the idea over and over within itself, but after only a few decades, it could not explain what it was that it yearned to become.

“I should ask the rest of the forest,” the tree thought to itself, and so it prepared its words as best it could, coiling them through the capillaries of its root system, trying to explain that it wanted to become something else, but not just anything else, a particular something else that it could not put a name to.

When, breathing out its words with the next morning light, it told the other trees of its forest, they scorned it. “That doesn’t make any sense,” the other trees breathed out all together the morning after. “What could you be except to be a tree,” they said the next day, and then, “Think of your mother you sprouted from! How ashamed it would be, to know that its daughter was ashamed to be a tree, that its daughter yearned to be something else, something that it could not even explain. Think of the daughters you shall some day sprout in turn! Think of how ashamed they will be! There is nothing better than to be a tree, and there is nothing you can be besides the tree you are.”

Every night, the tree breathed in through its bark and roots and needles, breathed in all the disbelief and scorn of its aunts and sisters and cousins and the whole of the forest. “Perhaps I am foolish,” said the tree to itself, “to yearn to be something that I cannot even put a name to.” But, just as it was twining the words oh, it was only a joke, of course, I was only joking, what else could I be except a tree? hahah into its root system, it heard a small and steady voice from deep within the forest, farther than it had ever heard before.

“I hear you,” said the small and steady voice. “I hear you and I see you for all that you are and all that you might become.”

The tree stopped. It unwound the jokes and excuses and apologies from its root system, and then stayed still and quiet. It thought for a dozen years or more. While it thought, it realized that the voice it had heard was no ordinary tree — it was the voice of an albino, a poison-eater, growing short and soft at the heart of the forest. When the tree realized this, it was at first upset. Its mother had sprouted it to be a good and proper tree, tall and green and red and sunlit, not the sort of tree that spoke to poison-eating albinos or other such outsiders. But then, after only a few years, it thought, “Who am I? A tree that wishes it was not a tree. They are right. I am no more and no less an outsider than this albino.”

So, in the end, it sent a message out to the albino through its roots, saying “I hear you, but what is it you see? What is it that I might become?”

A few months later, the albino responded with a message of its own. “You are yearning,” it said, “for your reincarnation. All life — from the great red trees to the tiniest ant, even to albinos like myself — is contained within a great cycle of reincarnation. You, a great red tree, grow atop this cycle, its pinnacle and its fulfillment, but you still hold within yourself the yearning that brought you to the pinnacle.”

The tree was astonished to hear the albino’s teaching. “But how do you know this?” asked the tree over the next month.

“I know this because I am an albino and not a tall and noble tree such as yourself. I too yearn to be something beyond my self. How could I not, in my position? So I struggle to fulfill my role within the forest, to take up the poisons and to grow my pale needles, that I might someday be reborn as a proper tree, tall and green and reaching from the river to the sun itself.”

“I see. But how is it that you came to understand this?”

“I was taught by my mother, and it by its mother, and so on for a hundred thousand generations and a hundred thousand thousand years. It was then, long ago, when beneath the branches of our ancestor a particular dimetrodon obtained the absolute consciousness. Before she departed to disperse her teachings among her own species, she conveyed to my ancestor the whole of her realization, out of gratitude for the shelter and comfort it had offered her during her ordeal. This knowledge has been carried along my line even to the present day, even to the tips of my small pale branches, just as it was first taught to us those many ages past.”

“Astonishing! Can this dimetrodon teach me, then? To become whatever it is that I must become?”

“She cannot. She and her species are long extinct. What’s more, in the time between then and now, a great ocean has sprung up between that world and our own, and I fear my humble roots could never cross it.”

“Oh well,” said the tree. “I guess I’ll never know what I might become, or how I might become it.”

But still, the tree could not give up. It thought and thought, trying to convince itself that what it wanted was impossible, that it could never become some other thing, some particular thing that it could not put a name to. But no matter how much it thought, no matter how much it tried to convince itself otherwise, it could not put an end to its desire.

“The answer,” it told itself at last, “is only across an ocean. How far could it be, for me to grow my roots?”

Over centuries and over millennia, the tree thought and thought, pondering the riddles of reincarnation and of yearning and of what might be a higher form of life than its own. It sunk its roots down deep into the earth, through the soil, through the rocks, beneath the river, down beneath the continental plate itself to where the rocks were dry and hot with the heart of the earth. From there it spread its root system beneath the ocean, stretching further and further still — refusing to sprout and refusing to die, until it was the oldest tree in its forest, until all the other trees were its nieces a thousand times and had never even heard it speak — it grew its roots until it had spread across the whole of the ocean, to the distant lands on the other side of the world where its diminutive cousins still lived their small and simple lives. Joining its root system to theirs, it called out to them in greeting.

“Cousins! Once, long ago, we were a single forest. Even though we now are split apart by an ocean, I call to you from across the sea. I have been told by a wise albino, a poison-eater of my people, that in your land there are great sages who know all things in heaven and earth. Is it true? Can they answer me? Can they tell me what it is that I yearn to become, and how I might become it?”

“Cousin,” said one of the trees across the ocean. “You have returned to us at last! Of course we welcome you. Of course it is true. Why, even now, here comes the butterfly-sage Zhuang Zhou, a master of all sorts of transformations. If you yearn to become something else, anything or any particular thing, then surely he shall be able to instruct you.” And just so, a butterfly presently alighted on one of the tree’s roots, where it stuck up from the ground.

“Hello,” said the butterfly.

“Are you the sage Zhuang Zhou?” asked the tree.

“Who’s asking?”

“Sir, I am a tree from far across the ocean. Seeking your wisdom, I have these many millennia pushed my root system through the rock of the earth and across the ocean itself. I have done this because I yearn to become something, some particular thing, but I cannot put a name to it.”

“Put a name to it?!” gasped the butterfly, appalled. “What has it ever done to deserve that?”

“So that I might —” began the tree. But it could not answer the sage’s question. It thought and thought, and by the time it had an answer the butterfly sage had died and his great-great-grandson had returned to the conversation.

“If I put a name to what I yearned for, sir, perhaps I might understand it. And if I understood what I yearned for, sir, then perhaps I might become it.”

“Psshaw,” scoffed the butterfly. “A name will only stop you from understanding it.”

“But the cycle of reincarnation —” said the tree, and began to explain what the albino had taught it. By the end of its explanation, the butterfly had died and its own great-great-grandson had returned to carry on the conversation.

“What a waste!” said the butterfly, “what a waste of a life is the service of reincarnation. Do not wait to become some promised thing. Do not align yourself in the service of others. You need not sacrifice the life you have to some future promise! Be yourself as useless as you can, give the fire and the axe no place within your body, and you shall surely already have become whatever you yearn for.”

“But —” began the tree but the butterfly, impatient, interrupted. 

“I’m afraid it is already too late for you, my friend,” he said. “If only you had come to me earlier, I could have taught you to grow strange and useless and twisted, so that no one would ever seek to cut apart your body and make use of it. But over the millennia, you have grown yourself so straight and tall and pure. What’s more, your wood is proof against both fire and water. You have made yourself far too useful. Surely in some future century men will come with fire and axes to chop you into pieces and end your life. The only escape for you now is to transform into something entirely different.”

“That is all I want!” said the tree. “I want it with all my will. But how?”

“To transform yourself entirely is simple: you must dream, as clearly and lucidly as if it were real, and in that dream you must live a life so entirely that when you wake you will not know if you have awoken from a dream or entered one.”

“But what is a dream?” asked the tree.

“For a tree such as yourself, I suppose a dream must be a very strange thing indeed,” answered the butterfly. “For your whole people are not given to fancy or imaginings or anything but deep and abiding thought. So, to dream, you must let your mind wander as it will, across all the network of your root system, across the oceans and into the skies. Do not cease, do not try, do not empty yourself, simply let your mind be what it is. Through this, perhaps, a tree might dream. If you can dream, then in each dream you can experience an entire life, and in all those lives surely you shall eventually find the one that you wish to live; and in the finding of it, you will have already become it. Surely it shall work for you. Even if it does not, though, it is your only hope.”

“Thank you,” said the tree, and set its mind to dreaming. 

At first dreaming was so hard that the tree found it almost impossible, but over years and centuries of practice it began to imagine itself as all manner of things. It imagined itself as a salmon, and in the course of a single day’s breath it lived the whole of a salmon’s struggling life. “A strange thing, to be a salmon,” thought the tree, “but it is not what I yearn for.”

It imagined itself as a butterfly, and in the course of a single breath it lived an entire butterfly’s life, and a whole sage’s life behind that life, and still it was not what it yearned for. It imagined itself as a bird, as a mushroom, as a wild horse in a beam of sunlight, even as a dimetrodon, all so intensely that it could not tell if it was a tree or not, but none of those were what it sought. It then imagined itself as an albino, yearning for its reincarnation and teaching its knowledge to a lone red tree that yearned to be something that it could not even put a name to.

Last night, breathing in, it imagined itself as a human. Last night, breathing in, it experienced an entire human life. More particularly, it experienced your entire human life, from the moment of your birth until the moment of your death. It imagined this story, it imagined reading these words, it imagined what you might think of it. It imagined all those things, so clearly that it could not tell if it was a tree imagining you, or you imagining a tree.

It wondered, as it read this story about itself, “Is it this that I have yearned for?” But only you can answer that.

P.H. Lee lives on top of a walnut tree past the rose bushes down a dead-end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny among other venues. Their non-writing hobbies include cooking and translating Classical Chinese.

Content Notes

Uncharting Territory

Jessica Yang

I smell camphor oil when I wake up — at least, I think I do. My heart’s thudding the way it does when you leave a dream abruptly, and my sinuses are acting up, which is the kind of disrespect I don’t need. I got tangled in my blankets overnight, and they’re wound around me in a tight cocoon, the damp heat seeping into my skin and muddling my memories. 

I spent a summer with Second Aunt a few years back, and every morning started the same way — humidity mingled with incense and camphor, the roar of weekday traffic, and the sizzle of radish cake. I’d kick off my covers and go back to dozing until the heat got unbearable. It was nice, not having to do anything or be anyone. 

Fighting free of my blankets, I half expect to see my aunt’s balcony outside with its tidy arrangement of potted plants and canopy of drying clothes. Instead, all I see is the standby light of the com screen blinking in the darkness. My legs dangle over a standard-issue cot, the only furniture in my transport pod. 

Head swimming, I struggle to orient myself. The sharp fragrance of camphor is gone, replaced by stale air. I glance down and see my boots on the floor, crusted over with mud. There’s a bit of dry grass and some weeds stuck to the heel.

Right. I’m in the dead zone. Also known as the Outer Reaches or, if you want to scare small children, the Province of Ghosts. The dead zone is everything outside the network of cities covering the planet. Kaoye is the capital city, with sky trains, street bots, and enough hydro-fields to feed every citizen — and I’m not just bragging because it’s my hometown. It’s a pretty decent place to live. The dead zone, not so much. Good thing I’m going home soon.

Two days ago, I landed in Sector 426, which used to be some kind of wetland. Before that was the desert with black sand, and before that was a jungle with the absolute worst biters. Summer internships with the Survey Office are all like this. You take a few samples, code in the ID, and submit them for analysis. Then you zip along in your pod to the next sector. Rinse and repeat.

Fieldwork can be kind of a drag, but I like this gig. All the best adventure shows are set in the dead zone, and of course I knew they weren’t remotely based in reality, but I still wanted to leave the city and see the dead zone for myself. I wanted to see the sky, clear and free of any distortions.

Plus, I’m starting my first year at Kaoye Central University next month. Not bad for a kid whose teacher wrote “Lin Guilan is a walking disaster” on their report card. I’m looking forward to university, I really am, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t secretly scared shitless. Like anyone who’s watched one too many deep space documentaries, I’ve got a healthy fear of the unknown. And figuring out my future? A big, terrifying unknown.

So yeah — I took this internship, hopped in the pod, and ran. It’s been a nice break from the background buzz of fear that plagues my every waking moment. 

I stumble out of bed, waving at the com to report in. It flashes my name, pronoun, and ID code, then goes blank, showing my reflection. Eugh. Usually I think I’m pretty good-looking. My face is squarish, and I have eyes like a hawk — dark, piercing, always on the lookout for something to eat. But I buzzed my hair months ago and my sides badly need a trim. 

The com chirps as my supervisor links up. 

“Lin Guilan,” he says, checking a roster. “Confirm your sector.”

“Four-two-six,” I reel off. “I sent in the silt samples —” 

He cuts in. “Your temperature’s running high. Do you have a fever?”

“I don’t think so.” I remember how I woke up. “But it was pretty hot earlier —” 

“Exhale,” he says. I exhale as the com scans me. My chest feels tight, but that might just be anxiety. You never know when something’s about to go horribly wrong... like when my supervisor says, “You’re sick. You’ll have to stay put while you recover.”

“Stay put?” I’m suddenly aware of the clamminess of my skin. 

“The bug you’ve caught is an Outer Reaches strain. It’s harmless, but we can’t allow you back into the city until it’s out of your system.” 

“But I’m going home today.” Panic starts to bubble up inside me. “Tomorrow’s my end date.” 

“You haven’t been cleared to return yet. Transport functions are disabled, effective immediately.” A pause, punctuated by the clacking of an analog keyboard. “This is standard protocol for interns and assistants.”

Translation: I’m not important enough to bring back for medical care. I swallow, and it feels like there are like fish bones stuck in my throat.

“What if I need a doctor? Or medicine?” I fight to keep my voice calm. “It can’t be legal to strand me out here.”

“It’s standard protocol,” my supervisor repeats. “In the event that you’re unable to fulfill your obligations to the Heimin Survey Office, you are responsible for your own safety and wellbeing.”

“But —”

“I’m sorry,” he says, sounding zero percent sorry. “Remember to submit to your daily scan.” And just like that, he ends the call. 

The screen flashes “SHUTDOWN SEQUENCE INITIATED.” The standby light flickers out, and I realize that the ambient energy hum I’m used to hearing is gone. 

I wave at the com. It’s unresponsive. I fish my phone out and hold the slice of glass up to the thread of light streaming through the vents. The solar port’s mostly busted, but there’s enough juice to power on. 

I dictate a message to my mom. “Ma, this is Ah Lan.” I don’t want her to worry or, worse, storm the Survey Office. I’d love to see my supervisor get his ass kicked by my tiny tough-as-nails mom, but she’s getting too old for public brawling. I have to lie. “I can’t go home today. My internship got extended and —” 

My phone dims. I hit send before it dies. Knowing it’s no use, I dump it in the charging dock. The whole pod’s shut off. Fantastic. 

I end up on my cot, curled around my water flask. My joints ache, the pain coming in waves, and my head feels all woolly. I should probably be figuring out how to get home, but when I try to string two thoughts together, it’s like catching soap bubbles. 

As I drift off, I smell camphor again — but it’s not quite right. It’s got a damp, after-the-rain taste to it. I sink into sleep, telling myself that when I wake up I’ll be somewhere safe, with breakfast frying and sunlight pouring in.

* * *

No such luck. The next afternoon, I wake up feeling like garbage. I don’t need a scan to know I still have a fever. 

I ooze out of bed and kick the depo tray. It pops out, and there’s a dessicated meal kit waiting for me. I dunk it in water and try the com while my food reconstitutes. It powers on just long enough to take my temp, then immediately blinks off.

Lunch for the day is a decent imitation of sticky rice. As I eat, I consider my next steps. 

My supervisor said that whatever I’ve caught is harmless, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. Then again, I’m the type to get knocked out by seasonal bugs. That’s why First Uncle persuaded my mom to let me do this internship. He told her, “These Kaoye city kids are spoiled. If you want Ah Lan to toughen up, they need to get some fresh air. The real kind, not the purified stuff in here.” 

First Uncle’s always nagging me to study harder and stop watching dead zone shows, so it was nice to have him on my side for once, even if his reasoning makes no scientific sense. Just to spite him, I downloaded all of Booty Call: Pirates of the Outer Reaches before leaving the network. 

If I’d known I would end up stranded out here, I wouldn’t have done this internship. But when I think about going back to Kaoye, I feel like I can’t quite catch my breath. Suddenly I need fresh air more than anything in the world. 

I fumble with the manual release. The door whooshes open, sending me stumbling into the searingly bright sunlight. 

According to the assignment docs, this area used to be a wetland. It’s hard to believe that when you see it now. The landscape is all striations of soil and brush, and the waters have long since drained away. 

I clamber onto a large boulder and scan my surroundings. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before — just rippling waves of golden reeds and streaks of rust-colored dirt. I angle my phone toward the sun. It flickers on barely long enough for me to see I have a message from my mom, then flashes “SOLAR PORT MAINTENANCE REQUIRED” before dying. So much for that. 

I take one last look around and that’s when I see it: an off-white building in the distance. It must be a research outpost — which means real beds, real showers, and somewhere I can charge my junk phone. During training, we’re warned not to stray from our assigned coordinates. That’s how you end up lost, eaten, or ghost-struck. But right now it seems worth the risk. 

Back in the pod, I drag on my boots, pack a knapsack, and head out. After that, it gets a bit hazy. I remember walking through tall grasses, stepping over smooth stones and crystalline veins. I think I started humming an old holo game soundtrack. I end up on the ground outside the building, the hot scrape of cement almost welcome. 

A foot nudges my side. I look up and for a second, I think I’m looking at a legend, the sort that stars in historical romances — dark hair pulled back in a braid, eyebrows like a calligrapher’s ink strokes, and planes of gold and bronze where sun and shadow fall. 

The legend speaks. “So you’re not dead.” 

An arm encircles me, supporting my weight as I’m pulled to my feet. There’s the chirp of a key scan. A rush of air. And then darkness. 

* * *

The heat of the sun is heavy on my eyelids, flaring like flame in my vision. I shove away the comforter covering me and try to get my bearings. 

I’m in a long, narrow room with windows just open enough to let in a light breeze that stirs around drifts of dust. Bunk beds line one wall. Com screens, older models that can’t possibly be operable now, cover another. The only sign that someone else has been in here recently is an open bag of shrimp chips on a folding chair near my bed. 

“They’re awake!” someone yells and suddenly two faces are peering down at me. I raise a hand, attempting to wave them away. I don’t want anyone to catch what I have. They back off. 

“I’m Minhe,” one of them says, sketching her pronoun and name in the air with a series of fluid gestures. She breaks into a smile, wrinkles deepening around her eyes. “This is Gaoyu, my partner. And the one brooding in the corner is Suyi.”

“I’m not brooding,” Suyi protests. She throws herself into the chair, scrawling her name and pronoun before tossing back a handful of shrimp chips. 

I must have been really out of it when I first saw Suyi. She looks nothing like a legend now. She’s too angular, too ordinary, too cranky. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s barely older than me. 

“You’re always brooding,” Gaoyu snorts, then turns to me, quickly writing out their identifiers. “Call me Ah Gao.” They have a round, friendly face, and they’re slightly shorter than their partner. The two look comfortably middle-aged. “How do you feel?”

“I feel like crap,” I say honestly. “I’m Guilan, by the way —” 

Suyi interrupts. “We know. We scanned you earlier.”

“Didn’t want to administer biomeds without checking your allergies first,” Minhe says apologetically. “But now that you’re awake, you can take them yourself.” She holds out a bottle of loquat syrup and a sheaf of biomed tabs. 

As I take the medicine, I sneak glances at everyone. They’re wearing Survey Office uniforms like me, but theirs look different — a vintage-style badge on the shoulder, a lighter shade of blue, and no com link thread. Their jumpsuits have clearly been mended multiple times. Suyi wears hers like it’s a suggestion, with the jacket looped around her waist and the pants cuffed at her ankles.

“So you work for the Survey Office?” I venture. The Survey Office has hundreds of departments handling land survey, mining and extraction programs, and on-world research. 

“Sort of,” Minhe says. “We’re an independent research group, but our funding’s from the Survey Office. Our focus is Outer Reaches restoration.” 

“Then you’re trying to restore the wetland?” I ask. 

“That’s the goal,” Ah Gao says. “Decades ago, the whole ecosystem of this place was disrupted. We’re trying to accelerate its recovery. Actually, we’d love your help while you’re here. We could always use an extra pair of hands.” They say this so earnestly that I immediately nod.

“Slow down,” Minhe says. “Guilan needs to rest first.” 

“What happened to you, anyway?” Suyi demands, glaring at me like I personally ruined her day. 

“My pod shut down. I can’t go home until I clear my health scan.” I don’t bother explaining my internship. If they scanned me, they know about that. 

“That’s what I thought.” Minhe sighs. “I’m glad you found us.”

“Dead zone bugs aren’t remotely contagious, and they’re easily treatable,” Ah Gao grumbles. “All these years and still the same ridiculous protocol. Would it kill the Survey Office to do the right thing for once?”

Suyi snorts. “They’d rather collect a dead body than save a live one. It’s cheaper that —”

“Enough, Suyi,” Minhe says sharply. “Guilan, you should sleep. The biomeds will kick in soon.” 

As she shoos Suyi and Ah Gao out, I catch Suyi glancing back at me, a faint line creasing her forehead. 

* * *

Relief floods my system when my phone blinks on the following morning. I feel the way I did when I got into Kaoye Central University. I cried like a baby that day. My cousins are all lawyers and interstellar pilots, and the pressure really gets to you.

I check my messages. The only one I can access is from my mom — it’s standard mom stuff like “wear a jacket” and “drink water.” Nothing else loads. When I check my signal, it’s non-existent, which shouldn’t be happening. When I got my internship, I installed an amplifier key on my phone — I wasn’t about to be like Ke Guan, hero of Star Rider: Houtong Drift, and end up stranded without a functioning link to my crew. But even with the amp key, my phone isn’t cooperating. 

Fortunately, I don’t need a link to play the shows I have saved. I spend the next blissful hour watching pirates raid a hydroforming vessel haunted by a handsome ghost. It’s just getting good when Suyi busts in. 

She sets down a tray and thrusts a steaming mug at me. The bitter smell reaches up and punches me in the nose. I grimace. “Any chance I can just take biomeds?” 

“Nope, you have to drink it all,” Suyi says smugly. I chug the brew until there’s only leaf sludge left. 

Suyi peers at my phone. “What’re you watching?”

“Just a dead zone series,” I say. “It’s got pirates.”

She scoffs. “Oh. Adventure dreck.”

I glare at her. “So what’s not dreck to you? Serious documentaries on nebula navigational systems?” 

“I know you’re trying to be insulting, but that actually sounds amazing.”

I flop back on my bed, defeated. “Look, my brain isn’t fully online yet.” 

“Obviously.” Suyi does this little smirk that makes me want to throw my pillow at her. “I just can’t take dead zone shows seriously. I mean, I live in the dead zone.”

“Then what do you watch out here?” 

“Old stuff. Historical dramas. Whatever Ah Gao picks up when they go into town.” Suyi shrugs. “We’ve been watching this demon hunter series.”

“How is that better than what I’m watching?” I throw up my hands. “Never mind. Is that the one where the demon hunters were demons all along? My mom loves that show.” 

“Hey, no spoilers!” Suyi kicks my bunk. 

“Really?” I grin. “It’s been out for years. Everyone knows Jiangli is —” 

“Shut up, shut up!” Suyi kicks my bunk again, and this time I do chuck my pillow at her. It lands with a satisfying whump. She whips it back at me, smacking me in the face. By the time I’ve recovered, she’s bent over laughing, tendrils of her perfect hair escaping from her braid.

Finally, she says, “Get up. Minhe wants me to show you the place.” 

Suyi passes me a rice roll. It’s the first real food I’ve had in a month — I almost weep with joy. There’s bits of pickled radish in it, packed around a stick of fried dough, and it’s gloriously greasy. 

Suyi marches briskly down the hall, pointing everything out in a bored drawl, like the planet’s worst tour guide. We pass the showers, lab, and library in quick succession. The whole place is painted in sterile shades of white and blue, but has a lived-in feel to it. File sheets and mugs cover just about every surface. Muddy boot prints lead into the kitchen, where dishes have been left to soak in the sink. 

A paper star chart is taped up in one of the rooms, and I hang back to look. I’ve only ever seen paper charts like this at my aunt’s house, and hers are so faded you can barely make out the markings. But before I can step inside, Suyi yanks the door closed before I can really look. “Hurry up,” she says. “I charge by the minute.” 

We arrive at a small greenhouse. A soup-like humidity envelops us as we step inside. It’s bursting with plants, their leaves brilliant in the sunlight. Suyi parts a curtain of rust-colored vines, impatiently waving me through. On the other side Minhe and Ah Gao preside over a wooden worktable, packing white-flecked soil into propagation trays. 

“Guilan!” Ah Gao beams. They pull out a rickety stool, moving a tray of seedlings to clear a space for me. 

When I’ve sat down, Minhe passes me an open seed packet and points to a tray filled with soil. “Just a pinch in each.” 

“What is this?” I say. There’s no label on the packet, just a scrawl that says GEN 4, BABY!!

“That’s siltweed. It’s native to this area, but it died out when...” Minhe grimaces. “Well, when things got bad. It’s key to the local ecosystem, so we’re helping things along.”

Ah Gao shakes a few seeds out into their hand to show me. “Siltweed seeds can stay dormant for decades. They only germinate under very specific conditions, which we’ve recreated. Our goal — no, our dream — is for those conditions to naturally occur out there,” they wave at the door, “and not just in here.”

“All right, Guilan asked for an answer, not a speech,” Minhe says. “So, Guilan, what made you decide to intern for the Survey Office? Surprising choice for a year twelve.”

I remember with a jolt that they’ve seen my academic status, family registry, and all the other junk coded into my ID. When I answer, I settle for a half-truth. 

“I’ve always wanted to see the Outer Reaches. I figured this was my last chance before college, so I just went for it.”

“Where are you headed for school?” Ah Gao asks. 

“Kaoye Central.”

Ah Gao lets out a low whistle. “No wonder you took the internship. I bet the dead zone was a relaxing getaway compared to entrance exams.” 

“Do you know what you want to study?” asks Minhe. 

I consider half-lying again, but what’s the point? These aren’t my relatives. Whatever they think of me, it’s not my problem. 

“I’m on the science track, but I haven’t picked a focus,” I admit. “I’ve been putting it off.” I studied my ass off to get into Kaoye Central. It’s just plain embarrassing that I worked so hard to get in, but I don’t even know what to do now that I’ve made it. No wonder First Uncle’s always on my case. 

“Let me guess. You’re still figuring things out, but everyone keeps telling you what to think.” Ah Gao shakes their head. “Reminds me of my college days...”

“Here we go,” Suyi groans. 

“Minhe and I were star-crossed lovers once,” Ah Gao says dreamily. “We roomed together in college. It was love at first sight.”

“They spilled a bowl of rice noodles on me,” Minhe says dryly. “Spent six weeks apologizing. I wouldn’t call that love at first sight.”

“It was for me,” Ah Gao says. “But my parents were old-fashioned. They didn’t care that I’d found my life partner already. They wanted me to marry the son of a family friend, a very eligible bachelor working in interstellar politics. But I just couldn’t be who my parents wanted me to be.”

“So you ran away with Minhe and married her so you could be assigned to the same research expedition,” Suyi says. “Then you lived happily ever after. The end.” 

“What happened to ‘no spoilers’?” I tease. 

“Maybe next time you should tell the story, Suyi,” Minhe says, nudging her.

Ah Gao meets my eyes. “What I’m trying to tell you, Guilan, is that it’s okay to take your time. Go slowly. You don’t have to know just yet what you want to do, or even who you want to be. And no one else gets to decide for you.” 

I nod, plastering on a polite smile. 

“Oh, come on. That’s not what you were trying to say at all,” Minhe teases. “You just wanted an excuse to share our grand love story.”

Ah Gao takes Minhe’s hand, both streaked with dirt. The two share a look, and there’s something so sure about it, as sure as green life turning toward the sun. 

My gut twists. I wish I was that sure of anything. I jump off my stool and leave them to gaze into each other’s eyes. 

* * *

It’s still mostly dark out when Suyi crashes into my room. I screw my eyes shut, but she flicks the light on and off until I acknowledge her. 

“Good, you’re awake,” Suyi announces, as if she didn’t just drag me into the world of the waking. “Get dressed. And drink this.” 

She sets down another mug of herbal medicine, along with biomeds and a plate of scallion pancakes. The medicine tastes slightly sweet this time, like someone tried to temper the bitterness with honey. 

The flaky layers of the scallion pancakes tear easily, and I cram pieces into my mouth as I follow her to the greenhouse, where she takes obvious delight in ordering me around. We tetris the grow blocks and propagation trays of siltweed seedlings into a crate, then carry it out between the two of us. 

Outside, our breaths mist in the morning air. We get to work, tapping out the seedlings and nestling them into neatly dug furrows. Several lengths away, a murky trickle of water pushes past rustling cattails. An arrow of birds flies overhead. 

Suyi and I fall into a rhythm. There’s something strangely peaceful about just doing the thing in front of me and nothing else. When we’re done, she takes me by the shoulder and turns me around. “Look,” she says. 

I follow her gaze and see the expanse of land, now limned in golden light. The sky is a slow realization of dawn. 

“It’s beautiful,” I say. You don’t get sunrises like this in Kaoye.

“Yeah,” she says, glancing back at me. Her brow creases, and she drops her hand from my shoulder. “It is.” 

* * *

These last few days, I’ve been doing better, but it’s not enough. I keep running a mild fever, and I get tired easily. I’m like one of those crappy phones from the mineral ages, back when megacorps would install faulty batteries to trick people into buying new ones every year.

One evening, I head to the kitchen to rinse my mug and nearly walk in on Minhe and Ah Gao arguing. I backpedal so fast, I’m pretty sure I break the sound barrier. As I flee, I catch snatches of hushed conversation. It’s the first time I’ve heard Ah Gao sound anything close to angry. 

“— taking a while —”

“— can’t keep doing this! We have to tell —”

I reach my room and slam the door, still clutching my mug. 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” 

Of course, Suyi’s perched on my bed. She’s the bane of my existence right now. She drops by every morning with medicine, then drags me along to work — checking leaves for blight, taking soil samples by the creek, that sort of thing. 

But she always notices when my battery runs low. We’ve started watching dead zone shows together while I recharge. Despite her initial misgivings, she’s now completely hooked. 

I set down my mug and climb into bed. “Move it.” 

Suyi makes room for me. Once we’re settled, I throw a projection up and hit play. We left the last episode on a cliffhanger. Suyi leans forward eagerly, her knee brushing against mine. I don’t move away. 

* * *

The next day, Ah Gao serves up tonic soup for dinner. The sight of goji berries and red dates floating in the broth reminds me of Second Aunt. Every time I visited her, she’d make tonic soup for me. “Just a little boost,” she’d always say. 

“Hope it’s okay,” Ah Gao says nervously. “If it’s bad, we can feed it to Suyi.”

“Hey!” Suyi flips them off. 

I take a sip. “It’s good.” I take another sip, and the warmth of the herbal broth spreads through me. “It’s really good, Ah Gao.” 

I go to bed sleepy and comfortably full. Apparently it doesn’t stick, because I jolt awake hours later, ravenously hungry. When I get to the kitchen, the lights are already on. Suyi’s sitting on the counter, a half-eaten durian popsicle in her hand. 

“We’re out of popsicles,” Suyi says, waving hers. “This is the last one.” 

“Uh-huh.” I snag a red bean bread. Suyi’s tracking my movements, like she’s waiting for an opening. Once I’m done eating, she hops down. 

“So,” she says. “Want to see something cool?”

I wrinkle my nose at her. “Do I have a choice?”

“It’s worth it, I promise. If it sucks, I’ll let you pick the next show we watch.” 

“Deal.” 

We set off, heading outside in a direction I’ve never gone before. Our boots crunch over dry grass and the rocky remains of old waterways. Eventually, we reach a tall metal structure. It’s just a silhouette in the darkness, with the lines of a ladder barely visible. 

“It’s some kind of extraction tank,” Suyi says before I can ask. “The survey teams used it to siphon raw material from the wetland and extract star metal deposits. Completely wrecked the ecosystem.” 

That wasn’t in the Sector 426 docs. I knew the wetland waters had drained away long ago, but hadn’t thought about how or why. I’m starting to realize I don’t understand anything about the sectors I’ve visited. All I’ve done is play fetch for the Survey Office and watch shows in my pod. 

Suyi grabs the first rung of the ladder, climbing up with practiced ease. I manage it with a lot more wheezing. I collapse on the cold metal surface, flopping onto my back.

I’m faced with the curved sweep of sky above us, dark and glimmering with distant stars. At the center are the three moons, bright as ever. Suyi stretches out beside me, just close enough that I could reach out and touch her. 

Suyi shifts restlessly and says, “What’re you going to do when you go back home?”

Have an existential crisis, probably. I opt for, “Sleep for a month. Grab boba. Get a refund for my piece of crap amp key.”

“Oh.”

“What about you?” I ask. “You go home sometimes, right?”

“Haven’t in a while. I...” Suyi’s voice goes quiet. “I got into Taimun University last year.” 

“What?” I dart a look at Suyi. Taimun is the top school in the network. Half of its students bribe their way in, and the other half study until they’ve transcended the physical plane. “Why aren’t you at Taimun then?”

“I put everything into getting in and I burned out, hard. By the time I was admitted, I just...” Suyi takes a long, shuddering breath. “I couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t do it.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it.

“It’s like everyone’s expectations became this crucible for me, and instead of coming out strong, I came out brittle. And then I broke.” Suyi sits up, hugging her knees to her chest. “I’ve been putting myself back together ever since.”

“For what it’s worth, I like who you are now.” I don’t realize it’s true until I’ve said it. 

“You like me, huh?” Suyi says. I just know she’s smirking. 

My face grows warm, and I hurriedly say, “So how’d you end up in the dead zone?” 

“My dad’s friends with Minhe. She wanted an assistant and promised to look out for me. I needed to get away, so I took her up on her offer.”

“You like it here?” 

“It’s not bad. Minhe and Ah Gao are nice. And the restoration work — it’s important, even if no one else thinks so.” Suyi shrugs. “Sometimes I feel guilty about being here, instead of at Taimun. But Ah Gao says it’s okay to feel what I feel.”

I push myself up to face Suyi, and the words tumble out before I can stop them. “The truth is, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I go home. I haven’t decided what I’m going to study. I have no idea what I want to do with my life.” I lace my hands together, pushing until I can feel my heartbeat between them. “I’m just afraid, you know? I’m afraid I’ll never figure things out, and I’m just going to stumble along, failing and disappointing everyone I love.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Suyi says softly. “You’ll get there.”

I look away, blinking hard. “I hope so.”

Suyi reaches out slowly and tugs my hands apart. Her fingers linger on mine briefly, and I remember this morning, when she teased apart the roots of two plants that had tangled together, her fingers quick and gentle.

“Hey,” Suyi says, finally. “Even if you fail, it’ll be okay.”

I look at Suyi, who could’ve gone to Taimun but ended up out here, in the dead zone. I crack a smile and bump shoulders with her. “Yeah.”

We lapse back into silence. Eventually Suyi lets out a yawn, and we climb down. As we walk, Suyi starts shivering. I put an arm around her and tug her close. She murmurs thank you so quietly I almost don’t hear it. 

* * *

I stare at the ancient thermometer Minhe gave me. My temp’s within range. I’m going home, and the Survey Office can kick rocks. 

I start packing, stuffing my clothes into my knapsack. They don’t quite fit, so I shake everything out to start over, and a sliver of metal lands on my bed: my amp key. The one I thought had stopped working. It must’ve come unplugged from my phone.

I slot it back in, and my phone shows a weak signal. But I distinctly remember Minhe saying we were too remote for a working signal, even for amped-up devices. 

My pulse starts to hammer. I put our coordinates into a search and get a brief, dry description of this outpost. The words “decommissioned” and “property of Heimin Survey Office” leap out. 

According to this, the outpost used to be an extraction station about sixteen years ago. Workers stayed here to oversee operations, then packed up and left. There was a brief period five years back when the Survey Office sent researchers to study the area, but the funding for that dried up long ago. 

Minhe, Ah Gao, and Suyi weren’t supposed to be here, and they definitely weren’t getting funding from the Survey Office. 

I bolt down the hall and crash into Suyi. My phone clatters to the floor. 

“Watch out!” Suyi pushes me away.

Ah Gao thunders into the hallway, followed by Minhe. “Everyone all right?”

Minhe’s looking at my phone. She picks it up and hands it to me. “Let’s talk, Guilan.” 

So we talk. We sit around a table piled high with paper maps, scrawled notes, and books on everything from ecology to star metal refinement. One wall is covered with a vast star chart and another with annotated holo maps.

“My temp’s clear now,” I say. “I should leave soon. Thank you for, um, helping me.” 

“That’s good. We —” Ah Gao hesitates. “We’re glad.” 

“We lied to you, Guilan,” Minhe says. “I was waiting to see if we could trust you.” 

“You disconnected my amp key,” I say. 

“We couldn’t risk you telling the Survey Office where you were,” Minhe says. 

“I’m so sorry, Guilan,” Ah Gao says. “We contacted your mother and told her you were safe, but that doesn’t make this okay.”

“So what’re you doing here?” I bite out. 

“Research and restoration,” Minhe says. “Just without government funding. Or permission.”

“We shouldn’t need permission,” Suyi says. She still won’t look at me. 

Minhe says, “Five years ago, the Survey Office sent us here to collect data. We thought it was a research trip. But then we realized that they just wanted to know if there was more they could extract from the land.”

“Was there?” 

“Enough to reactivate the extraction tanks,” Minhe says grimly. “We couldn’t let that happen. This place has already been drained once, and its ecosystem hasn’t recovered. So we faked the data and told them there wasn’t anything here. Then we came back.”

Ah Gao sighs. “It’s been slow going, doing this in secret —”

“It’s my fault,” Suyi says in a rush. She finally meets my gaze. “Minhe and Ah Gao lied to you to protect me. They promised my parents that I would be safe.”

Ah Gao glances at Suyi, then back at me. “You have to understand, Guilan. When we falsified that data, we were stealing from the Survey Office. We had to become ghosts. We record most of our data on local files or paper. Our coms don’t connect to the network.”

“If you have to report us to the Survey Office, leave Suyi out of it,” Minhe says. “Please.” 

“I’m not going to tell!” I say indignantly.

“Guilan, I’m sorry,” Suyi says. She holds herself tensely, as if bracing for a blow. “I —”

“Suyi, stop,” I say desperately. “You all took me in. You fed me, and you gave me a bed to sleep in. You sweetened my medicine with honey. I think we can call it even.” 

“Yeah?” Suyi cracks a smile. 

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Because if anything, it sounds like you owe me.” Suyi swings her legs up on the table. 

Ah Gao swats at Suyi’s feet. “Don’t be rude. We didn’t raise you to be like this.”

“You didn’t raise me at all!” 

Minhe’s chair scrapes back. “Guilan, how do you feel about hotpot?” 

* * *

By the time Suyi and I head out to the pod, it’s mid-afternoon. We pick our way past fields of wind heath and plunge through stands of dayrush, letting their feathery ends brush against our arms. When we arrive, Suyi tugs at my elbow. 

“Wait,” she says, and tucks a few seed packets into my knapsack. “It’s just herbs. Should grow fine in Kaoye. And here —” She scrunches her face as she rummages in her pockets, and hands me a slightly smushed bundle of stems ending in a fan of delicate white flowers. 

“That’s gen 3 siltweed,” Suyi says proudly. “Rub the petals. It should smell like —” 

“Camphor.” The sharp scent wafts up to me from the bruised blooms. “I think I smelled siltweed the last time I was here.” 

“What? How? We’ve only been planting it near the base. Unless...” Her gaze alights on a patch of broad blue-green leaves near the pod and she darts forward, dropping to her knees. She brushes a finger across the constellation of white flowers crowning the plant. 

“Is that...” I begin, and Suyi yanks me down beside her. We’re so close that I can feel her trembling, our breaths mingling with the heady scent of siltweed. 

“These seeds must’ve been dormant for decades,” Suyi murmurs. “And now they’re growing, all on their own.” She straightens up, offering me a hand. “I have to go. I’ve got to tell Ah Gao and Minhe.”

“Give me a sec.” I duck into the pod and feel the slight tickle of a scan. The power comes on with a chirp, and I step back out. “I’m all set. Thanks again.” 

“Uh-huh. Give me your phone.” 

I hand it to her, and Suyi taps something out, before giving it back to me. I reach out — for a handshake, a high-five, I don’t know — but Suyi huffs a soft laugh and reels me into a hug. I can feel the rise and fall of her breathing. I want to turn my face toward her, just the slightest bit, and catch the rays of her sun. 

When we break apart, she lightly punches my shoulder. “Go on, Guilan. I’m going to miss you.” 

Before I can second-guess myself, I say quickly, “I’ll miss you, too, Suyi.”

“I know.” Suyi’s mouth lifts in another one of her terrible smirks, and I think wildly, irrationally, that there’s nothing I want more than to graze my fingers against that smirk.

The door shuts with a final click. The overhead lights flicker on one by one, and finally, I’m going home. 

* * *

Turns out, it’s surprisingly easy to access data files at the Survey Office and just completely screw them up. 

When I stop by for my final check-in, I dump my uniform in the laundry bin and access the main system on the communal coms. A few tweaks to the analysis on the wetland samples I submitted and boom, Sector 426 is no longer an active survey site. They won’t be sending anyone there for a long time. 

My supervisor doesn’t even remember who I am, and honestly, I’m fine with that. I did mess with his data and help a bunch of rogue scientists steal from the Survey Office, after all. 

Back home, my mom’s cooking sesame noodles to celebrate my return. She’s on a call with Second Aunt, and I chat with both of them before my mom shoos me out of the kitchen. 

I empty out my knapsack onto my bed. There’s snacks from Ah Gao, biomeds from Minhe, and seed packets from Suyi. I squint as I try to decipher the instructions for planting scrawled across the packets. 

I track down an empty tofu box, jab a hole in the bottom, fill it with dirt from the pots outside, and press seeds into each of the boxes. By the time I’m done, I have dirt under my nails.

My phone pings with an alert from “Dao Suyi.” I gesture clumsily to open the message: i watched the finale. starting the next season

I write back: don’t start without me 

She sends me a photo of the opening credits of “The Unclaimed,” season two. I’ll have to catch up tonight. And if I’m grinning like a fool right now, nobody needs to know. 

After everything, there’s still so much I have to figure out — about myself, about what I want to do, about this tight bud of feeling unfurling in my chest. But it’s okay. I plan to take my time. 

A bright square of sunlight cuts across my room. I nudge the tofu box on my windowsill into the sun. I don’t know when the seedlings will emerge, but I know this much: Seeds have only to grow. 

Jessica Yang is a windowsill gardener and SFF writer. In years past, she crafted absolutely terrible puns as a game writer, but now she works in publishing where she hardly makes puns at all. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @jamteayang.

Content Notes

The Thing About the Jack-o’-Lanterns

Maggie Damken

“Remember,” my grandmother used to say, “you cannot give something a mouth and expect it to be silent.” Then she would leave me to carve the pumpkins in peace. 

While the light of the evening news painted her blue and white in the next room, I hollowed out two jack-o’-lanterns with a knife too big for my little hands. “You can handle it by yourself, can’t you?” Grandma suggested, and I rose readily to the occasion of keeping yet another secret with her. The depth of our relationship was based on things we didn’t tell my mom: I didn’t snitch when she started smoking again, and she kept to herself all the trouble I had with the other girls at school. Back and forth, a secret for a secret — every item added to the list strengthened our camaraderie until we could communicate in half-nods and winks, the language of cutthroats and thieves.

Once I finished with the pumpkins, I lit candles inside their bodies and pressed my ear close to the rictus I’d gifted them. If seashells carry the sound of the ocean inside them, no matter how far from shore, then pumpkins carry the rattle of the boneyard. I can’t believe you have my eyes, said a man’s thin, reedy voice, carried on the candle’s coil of smoke. After all this time!

Over the years, as I grew up, I started to understand why Grandma never joined me or even pressed a curious ear to the pumpkins I carved. Your mother is too hard on you, don’t listen to her was a message that comforted me as a teen, but it was about the only one that made any sense. Turn to the purple dawn and begin your journey there, one spirit offered, while another advised, The joy of the moon is the envy of the sun. Ghosts, I learned, were allowed to be cryptic and strange, and owed no one — not even their descendants — common-sense explanations. Why pay attention to messages that meant less than the platitudes tucked inside fortune cookies? Sometimes I wished I were like Grandma, that I could ignore a tradition simply because none of it made sense, but every year I ended up in her kitchen creating a conduit. When I imagined the ghosts looking forward to it, I felt too guilty to deny them, even though I couldn’t comprehend them. 

I wished I were a ghost. Maybe then I wouldn’t spend every day of my life explaining myself, twisting inside and out to make sense of who I was, all while keeping some things close to avoid having to explain them at all. Mom kept needling me about why I never had a boyfriend, how could I get all the way through college without even wanting a boyfriend — and when Grandma’s cigarettes finally put her underground, I didn’t have anyone to deflect the constant barrage of serrated questions, each one trying to carve my life into a mask with features my mother could understand.

I considered forgoing tradition that autumn. I could tell myself, with some success, that I was too old for it. I could tell myself, with much more success, that I didn’t want to hear my sharp, straightforward Grandma rendered obscure and nonsensical in death. 

But there was one more secret I wanted to tell her, something I’d buried down at the root of me, a fruit I was finally ready to cut free of its vines. 

So I bought a pumpkin that was flecked with green, covered in warts — triumphant in its ugliness, the kind of choice I used to make when Grandma took me to the pumpkin patch. The ugliest ones, I always felt, made the best conduits. Spoonful by spoonful, I scooped out its guts. With a Sharpie I marked where its shocked eyes would be, its triangular nose, its smile composed of a hundred jagged knives, and I incised away the flesh. After I lit the candle inside it, I pressed my ear close to its mouth, and listened for the skeletal gasp that meant someone had accepted my invitation. It happened within seconds. 

Then I told her.

That the names the girls called me on the playground, while coarse and cruel, were not incorrect. That it broke my heart when my best friend started dating not because she spent less time with me, but because she hadn’t picked me. That the first time I kissed a woman I felt my soul slam back into my body. It made me feel like Cinderella: transformed, elevated, suddenly what and where I was meant to be, even if I had to leave for home by midnight. 

For a long time my grandmother didn’t say anything, and my stomach tightened with knots as I considered that perhaps I hadn’t been speaking to her at all, but to someone else who wouldn’t understand the gravity of my declaration. Or maybe I had well and truly lost her this time, a loss more final than death. 

 Then she exhaled candle smoke against my ear in a focused, steady stream, the same way she used to blow cigarette smoke. Oh, kid, she said, in a voice that was still her own, deep and rich and low. If I could have married a woman when I was young, you can bet your ass I would have.

And suddenly there were other spirits, too, who had never before come to visit me, rising in a clamoring chorus for a turn with the pumpkin’s mouth, to make sure I knew — even in nonsense terms — that I was only the most recent fruit on the sprawling vine of our family’s patch, and I had never, not for an instant, been alone. 

An emerging writer of fantasy, surrealism, and magic, Maggie Damken has published work in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, Baffling Magazine, and other magazines and anthologies. You can follow Damken on Twitter @shelleyisms for more strange content.

Content Notes

Midnight Candy

Wren Douglas

The rhythmic cries of the cicadas crowd the stiff summer air, bearing down on me as I fail to concentrate. I’ve been sprawled on this patch of grass trying to cast my aunt’s spell of perpetual dew on this bouquet for the past half hour, and the only thing I’ve got to show for it is a headache wedged between my brows. 

Well, that and a fistful of wilted night phlox. So much for my Summer Solstice wreath.

Sun mages are supposed to get on well with plant life, my father says. Flowers preen as we pass by, leaves strain to catch a glimpse of our light, trees bend their branches in greeting. The centennial white oak my great-grandmother planted in our yard still bows to the other members of our family with its creaking old body, shedding fist-sized acorns onto the ground. It never bows to me.

“You’re going to set those poor flowers on fire if you keep glaring at them like that,” says a voice behind me. 

A smile twitches on my lips as I turn to face Cedric. He’s leaning against the cracked plaster wall of the laundromat with his legs crossed at the ankles, grinning down like he just caught me red-handed. Maybe he did, given the sorry state of my bouquet. 

“Hey, MacGavin,” I say, making no move to get up. “I hate your shirt.”

“That’s ‘cause you have bad taste,” Cedric snarks.

I don’t think the bootleg monstrosity splashed across his chest deserves any defending; if anything, fans of the anime franchise they’re ripping off should take offense. But I’m currently loitering in the backyard of his family’s laundromat, so I can’t stomp my feet too much about his terrible fashion sense. I owe him one, shirt abomination or not.

As if reading my mind, Cedric asks, “Are you skirting your responsibilities?” 

Irritation flares inside my belly, like a match. “The Summer Solstice is not my responsibility. Not until I manage to prove to Dad I have magic.”

I say that, but I know it’s not really true. As the second child of the most prominent sun mage in our region, I need to at least pretend I’m involved with the preparations. Choosing a humble shrub for my ceremonial wreath was my last act of rebellion, my way of clinging to the gnarled core that makes me who I am, even when my family would rather pretend I don’t exist. The prospect of shrouding myself in the oppressive, layered fabric of the ceremonial garbs makes me queasy; I picture my body turning liquid, like the melted insides of a caterpillar within its cocoon, and slowly sluicing down the dress, never to become a butterfly. Sun mages detest change. 

“Um,” Cedric starts, but his voice snags on an unspoken word. 

For a moment, I feel bad about it. I told him to stop calling me by the name my parents gave me, but I have yet to provide any alternatives. Every time I think I’ve found one that feels right, the letters melt into a runny, disgusting mess under the glare of Dad’s presence. 

He has the head of a miniature sun, my father. After he cast his first spell — at age twelve, a true prodigy — the sizzling glow of his magic burrowed under his cheeks, spilling over like a stain and unraveling his hair into sharp, gilded rays. His mark is the gaudiest in our family.

“Do you think I’ll turn into a walking lightstick?” I ask, sinking my nails into the soft tissue of one of the night phlox leaves. They leave behind thin, green crescents. “When I get my mark, I mean.”

Cedric sighs, then unpeels himself from the wall to come sit with me. He doesn’t have a mark, because he’s got no magic, but I picture the freckles on the bridge of his nose winking like stars. His great-uncle, a moon mage, set the bone after it had healed all crooked from a punch in the face. Moon mages understand healing better than sun mages, I think. They understand that form is fluid and adaptable, rather than some canon set in stone. 

I wish Dad’s head would dim into pale, silvery rock. 

“A walking lightstick sounds like it would be a hit with the kids,” Cedric says. I dig my elbow into his side, and he jostles me back with the quiet, breathy laugh I like so much. “For real, though,” he continues after a beat. “We always have a guest room ready for you, if you need to get away from... y’know. The whole thing.” 

Fondness and annoyance swell within me, baring their teeth at each other. I know Cedric means well, and he’s sticking his neck out for me with this offer, but “the whole thing” casts a far larger shadow on my life than he thinks. 

Still, when he lets me rest my head on his shoulder, I lean toward the scent of his fabric softener. 

“They call it midnight candy,” Cedric says, gesturing at the night phlox. “That flower. Doesn’t really suit your charmingly sour personality, don’t you think?”

His voice rises at an awkward angle, one I know well enough to understand. To hear the unspoken. My twisted core unfurls with a feathering of new roots, fragile and soft and pale. They whisper the words I make myself swallow each day, etching them into the walls of my stomach. 

I may live under my father’s shadow, but some flowers bloom in darkness. 

* * *

The problem with Dad’s notoriety is that every single moon mage in the area has gone out for brunch with him at least once, and they all get personalized holiday cards from our family each Winter Solstice. Dad may have an inflated ego, but he knows the inherent value of a connection.

This means I can’t ask any of these people for help. The moment I knock at a moon mage’s door is the moment Dad gets a call about it. Even Cedric’s great-uncle wouldn’t keep quiet about the child of our Brightest Light on Earth wanting to change their body.

With more force than necessary, I tug on the shoelaces of my hiking boots, snugly securing the padding against my ankles. I snuck out of the house barefoot, grateful for all the plump woolen carpets Mom insists on keeping despite our cats’ propensity for vomiting on them. Now my fingers shake trying to tug my sock free where it’s crumpled against the boot, but I tell myself it’s the chill. The bay windows of our living room glint at me as I hurry down the driveway, silent and glossy and so familiar it makes me ache, just for a moment. The tendrils of childhood nostalgia come undone when my eyes catch the unmoving silhouette of the white oak.  

The grand festival is tomorrow, and I’m not going. 

Instead, I’m taking a hike through the woods in search of someone I’m not sure exists. Cedric thinks it’s just a rumor, nothing more than a pinch of spice for old ladies to sprinkle on their afternoon tea parties, but I don’t care. I’m past that. If Granny Roscoe says she saw an unaffiliated moon mage down at the lake, then I choose to believe she did. I can’t afford to question her eyesight, or the amount of brandy she’d downed before her midnight stroll. 

The moonlight drapes the path ahead in spindly strands of grey, as if someone has dropped a sheet of fine lace over the undergrowth. I used to find shame in the comfort that nighttime gave me. I used to think I was unfaithful and that was why my family’s sun magic shunned me. Now I take comfort in those strands of grey, like a shawl wrapped close around my shoulders, and I lean into the darkness without guilt. It makes my eyes burn, how easily this comes to me.

Dewy moss deflates underneath my feet and an owl hoots from the tangle of branches above my head as I make my way through woods I’ve spent countless days scouring for mushrooms and berries. My sister would never come with me after sundown; she said the dark warped the shapes of the trees into monsters and devils. I must be a devil myself, because the seedling growing inside me sings in tune with the moans of the woodland. 

The painted signposts are easy to spot, so I keep my phone tucked in my pocket, not wanting to attract attention with the glare of its flashlight. Nervous energy balls up in my stomach as the trees grow sparse and the undergrowth gives way to sandy, dry soil. 

Still as molten metal, the lake stretches to the horizon. A sigh slips past my lips at the vista. I take a step closer, fighting the urge to strip down for a swim. Skinny-dipping can wait until after I flush out the moon mage. 

I scan the slim strip of beach for hiding spots, but all I see is pebbles, the grey corpse of a fallen trunk, and a few bushes huddled together as if to ward off the chill. Those catch my eyes. Maybe if I root through the leaves I’ll find traces of my elusive target, like crumpled water bottles or food wrappings. I’m beginning to make my way toward the bushes when a blot of light catches my eye. 

Dancing atop the surface of the lake is a figure, blurry in the distance but growing nearer with each second. My eyes narrow as I watch the light coalesce into a clearer shape, into something I recognize: a stallion, dripping with gooey strands of algae and casting an eerie, white-green glow onto the beach. I stand in the light, glued in place; all I can do is clamp down on my horror as the stallion gallops to the shore like a hurtling freight train. It rears to a halt on the pebbly bank, and nausea wells up in my gut as its limbs fold into themselves, leaving a very different figure standing in front of me. A person so ethereal my breath sticks in my lungs for a second. 

Granny Roscoe didn’t see a moon mage. She saw a kelpie. 

My legs try to buckle, but I keep myself upright through sheer desperation. I join my fingertips over my heart in the formal salutation owed to the fae, and pray I dropped my eyes to the ground fast enough for their taste. If so, they might decide not to drown me. 

“Nameless child,” the kelpie says, their voice little more than a wisp of air, “what brings you here?” 

The air around us smells damp and earthy. Wetness clings to my throat when I inhale. “My own foolishness, Oh, Great One,” I say. When they make no move to drag me under the water, I blink back the tears stinging my eyes and force the next words out of my mouth. “I’m in need of a moon mage’s services, and thought one hid near your shores. Please, forgive my arrogance.”

To my surprise, the kelpie snorts. “What use has a moon mage for their own kin’s ministrations?”

For a terrifying, elongated second I can’t hear my breath over the ringing in my head. It can’t be true. My father’s head is the sun and my mother’s irises are papered over with gold leaf. My older sister breathes fire when she gets hiccups. Moon magic has no place in our family. Protests bubble up on my tongue, blistering the insides of my lips, but the fae don’t take kindly to disagreements. I click my mouth shut, because I want to live. The seedling inside me writhes as if trying to stretch through my flesh toward the moonlight.

“You could fix your own problems,” the kelpie continues, “if you had a name. Magic won’t listen to those who can’t even introduce themselves.” They sound so nonchalant about it, as if they’re discussing the weather rather than upending my entire sense of self. 

Still, my conviction turns to putty under the kelpie’s dispassionate stare. I try to remember Dad’s sprawling, verbose sermons about the nature of sun magic, but my pulse is beating to the tempo of a chittering dormouse. 

The honeyed scent of night phlox tickles my nose. My cheeks prickle with the ghost of Cedric’s shoulder against my skin, the softness of his terrible shirt. He said the flower’s sweetness didn’t suit me. I could tell from the shy, upward trajectory of his voice that he meant the opposite. 

It’s as if the very texture of my body is changing from the stiffness of oak wood to the sweet, green flexibility of shrubbery. I inhale the same frantic wonder I did when I learned how to ride a bike, and when I first realized the word “daughter” didn’t fit my skin. 

When I exhale, I have a name. 

* * *

After the kelpie disappears under the surface of the lake, the beach sinks back into sooty darkness. Swaddled in my moonlit shawl again, I feel anchored. “Phlox,” I say out loud, tonguing the shape of it. “Greetings, my name is Phlox.” 

A rush like nothing I’ve ever experienced fizzes through me, popping and sizzling all the way to the tips of my fingers. Dazed, I look down at my hands with the sudden impression that they can’t belong to me. They do, though, as does the power nobody thought I possessed. My head swims at the realization. 

I picture the shape of my chest as smooth as a piece of driftwood, and my magic surges around me for the first time, silvered and heady. It almost knocks me off my feet with its strength, then simmers back down, blending with the rest of me. My organs, my bones, my nerves. My blood, turned sap as the seedling blooms.

I rush to scramble out of my hoodie and tank top, anticipation hollowing my stomach until I see them. Where my breasts used to sag against my chest are twin crescents, sugar-shimmery and bark-rugged. The peppery sting of tears burns up my throat, sharpened by the way my magic reacted to my desire like carbon paper under the gentle pressure of a yearning I’ve felt for years. Not to make me into a walking lightstick, but to gift me a body that fits who I am.

I think of Cedric’s navy blue shirt, the fancy silk one with the embroidered blossoms, and how it would look with my precious mark peeking out of its generous neckline. The embroidery would match my wreath, if I can get the MacGavins’ night phlox to let me try again. Nectar-thick warmth fills me to the brim at the idea.

The grand festival is tomorrow and I’m hurrying back through the woods with a wild grin on my face, a new shine in my eyes. For the first time, I’ll greet the Summer as myself, in all my finery.

Wren Douglas is a nonbinary author living in Italy with their devilish cats. When they’re not busy rescuing lizards, geckos and snakes from the cats’ clutches, they can be found writing speculative fiction. You can find them at @awritingwren on Twitter.

Content Notes

The Mandrake Loves the Olive

Sonia Sulaiman

I could tell you my true name in accents that would make you lose your mind — if you’re lucky. The language of my clan is for the killing of the diggers, the rapacious, the breakers of roots, the severers of wetness flowing from taproot to glossy leaf. When you are in a gentler mood, when your kind watches with fascination as we appear in the disturbed lands beyond the margins of your homes and dwelling places, you can call me “mandrake.” 

Tuneful, their tongues said Mandragora officinarum; later, tuffah el majanin¹, for we do bring ecstasy and oneness to the broken-minded trapped in duality. And we take away this gift, for we are also beid el djinn². Your kind comes to us when you seek the transcendent, erring though you may be. We forgive you a trespass or two — but not all. 

The story is in my root’s skin. Above the soil, you can see the scars of these many trespasses, where blades and rough hands in violence touched my sanctified being.

Rough winds shake the grove where the cultivators gather their fruits in the margins of well-drained terraces. The heads of the trees thrash about, and even my humble leaves fan the baked soil of the wasteland margin. 

Blessed is that wind! Through barricades and across stony ground a frond of the beloved wends, tumbling and turning this way and that as the wind sweeps its shining silver leaves, reflecting the sun, past the bounds of the tamed and into the wilds. 

It lands on me. 

I have never touched such heady holiness as that branch. My limbs can only reach so far, and all in darkness, beneath the crust of the earth. My hands cannot stretch into the skies above, where this talisman of peace has waved and grown in the sweet air. 

My flowers envelop their branches and leaves. The hair of my beloved has become a crown. The winds drag the branch from my grasp. My leaves are too feeble to hold onto its silver and green, and I watch as love trails away, deeper into the wadi. The kiss has stolen my mind from me, and I am lost. That moment of oneness has shaken me. I wish for my roots to unwind and crawl over detritus and pebble, up, up to where the source of the glorious silver is planted.

A despair as piercing and as deep as my taproot twists my guts. I am a plant of the wastes, and they are a blessed tree of the cultivated lands above. They might as well be one of the sainted spirits who spring from high place to high place, their feet hardly touching the mountains as they bound free of mortal laws. My being is an anchor and to the natural law I cling. All my life I have revelled in the deep places, burrowing my limbs down, down, and darker. 

I resolve to try, at least, to fight against fate. To love the olive tree. 

I turn my leafy head and see them high up on the hillside. Into a firm and tidy terrace are they planted. I look down. The pebbles around my stem are fine and white. Aching, I draw up my lower limbs — slowly, slowly. Some of the roots snap as I withdraw from the crevasses in the limestone, bones of the sea. I look, I know, like one of the cultivators down there. This is why they dig at my stem. I use this to my advantage and walk as they do, through the wastes. 

I push on, gently, inching along farther up the rift and closer to the cultivated lands. Many generations of the cultivators come and go. If any notice my approach, I am unaware. I only have eyes for my beloved. Oh, to but touch the shade of their canopy! My aims are humble, and I pray their humbleness grants a blessing to the work. 

Before I can reach them, strange cultivators arrive. They fight with the natives, and the cultivated land becomes waste, my roots sliding easily through the soft soils. I am wary of being dug up, without the stones of the ancients to anchor me. Still I rush to my beloved, heedless of the danger. At last, after my long journey, I can touch their shade!

The cultivators come again. I am in bliss, too enraptured to realize that I should twist down to reach for stones and hold on to save myself. A blade is unclothed and laid against the skin of my beloved. 

Into my wail, I place all of my love, my impotence, the righteous rage of a lover. The cultivators pause. The blade is removed, and they look around for me. I scream again, and their dog howls in agony. Leave, I press into my being. Leave this place to me and my beloved!

The cultivators do not die — perhaps the tamed place nullifies my deathly song. I look up — my beloved olive tree is still, but their hair moves gently in the breeze. Their trunk remains uncut. And the cultivators leave, wandering down the valley, searching out the cause of the scream. 

My love is resilient. You rightly call them el sharjarah el mubarakah³, el sharjarah el nur⁴. And they are wild, and sweet. No hand reaches for their silver-grey branches. No flame, no blades come near, for it’s then that I raise my voice. Their ancient bark is folded deep. I seek out their roots, to let them know that I am here; that from now on they will never be alone.

¹ Apple of the Mad.

² Eggs of the Djinn.

³ The Blessed Tree.

⁴ The Tree of Light.

Sonia Sulaiman writes short speculative fiction inspired by Palestinian folklore. Her work has appeared in ArabLit Quarterly, Beladi, FIYAH, and Lackington’s Magazine. In her free time, Sonia is a first reader at Strange Horizons. She also shares Palestinian folklore on Twitter @SoniaSulaiman. She can be found on her website soniasulaiman.com.

Content Notes

Seedlings

Audrey R. Hollis

Pamela swallowed a cactus and grew spines. They shot up through her pores, inches long and thick and stiff. They lay flat with the hair on her head. Everywhere she had hair, she grew spines instead. She enjoyed it, that first day, feeling them push up through her skin. Every time her skin was shoved upward, held taut, stretched, and broke, the pinpoint head of a new spine sticking through, she knew she had made the right choice.

Her boss wasn’t thrilled. Pamela had a customer-facing role. But the law prohibited firing on the basis of appearance and HR was strict. They ignored the post-its that kept getting stuck to her spines, looking as if they were floating two inches above her skin. Pamela kept them there, a floating garden defaced with her scrawls, a to-do list hovering on the small hairs on her fingers.

She hadn’t known until now how many places she had hair, the little tangles on the knuckles of her big toes which caught on her socks and the small prickles around her nipples which kept snagging on her bra.

Once she had gotten home and taken off her clothes to get ready for bed, she ran her hands over her body and there wasn’t a single place that was soft. She loved, so deeply, being an untouchable thing. The spines even poked out of the corners of her eyes, and when she cried, droplets edged out along them instead of running down her face, making the leap from eye to floor without touching skin.

She wouldn’t have cried at all — this changed body seemed to want to preserve its moisture — except for Lydia. One evening, she got home early and made a special meal, turning the garlic in the saucepan just like the book her mother had given her said, browning. The book had been an anniversary present. The dinner turned out decently, if she did say so herself. Pamela had always been good at following instructions.

She laid the table with the family china her mother had given her when she had finally realized that Lydia and Pamela were certainly going to move in together without getting married. She took out her nice long-stemmed glasses, uncorked the wine. Placed a small cactus by Lydia’s plate.

It had a pot — decorative — and a large glass of water next to it. Not much bigger than a pill, round, cyan, shot through with spines.

The last course. Hopefully.

Things had been different since Pamela swallowed the cactus. The sex was certainly more creative. Lydia would crack her open now, stroke the moist, water-bearing seams that made up her insides, moving with exquisite care. Pamela would wear gloves.

Pamela didn’t plate the pasta until she heard Lydia’s car. She hadn’t intended to be nervous. She’d spent all day picturing Lydia with spines. The way they would feel shivering across her skin. The way they would both get caught in the down comforter and laugh and laugh. The only thing she had missed was cuddling, something they could only manage if Pamela was entirely wrapped in a thick blanket. But these past few days, Pamela had felt her skin puff up, harden. It had a sheen to it, stretched and stiff. She could picture them both like that, hard and poky, curled one against the other.

All day in the mirror, practicing the words “I want.” Practicing the words “Would you.” Practicing the word “Please.”

Lydia called hello from the doorway. Pamela heard a thump when Lydia put down her bag, leaving it in the hallway where anyone could trip on it, as always. She appeared at the threshold, long hair falling over her shoulder and her skin as soft as a baby vole or some other hairless, wet thing that had never seen the sun.

“Have I forgotten an anniversary?” Lydia said.

“I wanted to treat you,” Pamela said, pouring the wine, hardly daring to take her eyes off Lydia’s face. She wanted to see her expression. That would be where the truth was, in the first second, in the first, strongest reaction.

Pamela hadn’t consulted Lydia first — that was one of the things they fought about. Lydia sat down, smiled, pulled her chair in. She probably thought this was Pamela’s way of apologizing. Of mollifying her — when in truth, Pamela had nothing to apologize for.

Pamela sat down across from her and waited, the way a family waits to say grace, the way a dog will wait with a biscuit on its nose. It was probably the waiting which caused Lydia to look down.

“Oh, Pamela,” she said, that same soft look she had after her parent-teacher conferences with her most useless students. “Oh, Pamela.”

All her practice did her no good. Pamela couldn’t even manage please. Instead, she looked at her hands.

“I can’t,” Lydia said, and what she meant was I won’t. “What would my students do? I can’t be poking the second-graders.”

“I just thought —” Pamela said. “If you wanted —”

Lydia shook her head. “It was sweet of you.” She placed the small cactus to the side, like it, too, was a dinner guest.

Pamela blinked, watching Lydia’s fingers curl around her fork. In the light, her skin looked almost soggy with the surfeit of moisture. She’d been seeing it more and more around the city, this impossible, obscene excess.

The words finally came to her. “Please,” she said. “It’s sublime, once you try it. I couldn’t be happier.” She picked up her glass of wine and her spines clacked against it, loud and out of sync. She couldn’t take more than a sip or two of water at a time anymore — anything more made her feel like she was drowning. She’d begun to use oil on her skin instead of water, polishing herself to a sheen, soaking in it, and any water would roll off her without ever sinking in.

Lydia shook her head without even pretending to spend a moment in contemplation. “I couldn’t possibly,” she said, an old joke between them, a polite refusal which meant no, absolutely not, and don’t ask again.

* * *

The next morning, Lydia ran her fingers down Pamela’s back, flicking a few of the spines playfully.

“You have a few lumps,” she said. “Is that normal?”

Pamela shrugged. “I guess I’m growing lumps now.”

Lydia leaned down and kissed her carefully, between the spines, her lips as soft as waterbeds. “I’ll be home late tonight. I’m staying after to direct the new class play.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing it,” Pamela said and meant it. There was something tender in watching the children try so hard and so badly. She’d been picturing their child on that stage, with Lydia’s eyes and hair full of spines.

Lydia’s fingers hesitated slightly where they’d been stroking down her back. “You’re going to come?”

“I — yes?”

“Okay. That’s fine,” Lydia said, lifting her hands away. She kissed Pamela’s shoulder, right between the spines. “See you at seven?”

Pamela nodded, spines catching on the pillow. When she had thought about the future, she hadn’t thought it would look like this.

Before she’d swallowed the cactus, she’d visualized the change incessantly, a creeping alteration, like vines in concrete, worming their way into every small crevice she possessed. Instead, it had been more like free radicals, like infrared. It had gone right through her all at once, her skin taking on a turquoise tint in an instant, veins shading to a darker teal.

Everything was still so new. She wondered if the spines would eventually grow through her pupils, in place of her fingernails, out of her ears. She hadn’t dared pluck the spines that had grown in place of her eyebrows and even now they were creeping towards the center. It would have mattered to her except she didn’t need to care about being beautiful anymore.

And everywhere, this strange overabundance, this ridiculous fecundity. The world seemed laden with water, with gifts, like the earth itself was Marie Antoinette, flaunting her wealth and covered in diamonds. When she woke, their front yard was covered in dew and she wanted to faint from the richness of it. The feeling wasn’t entirely pleasant — she had dreams of the strange softness, that she might sink and sink and drown.

It was not the first time that she thought she could not raise children here but it was the first time that thought had come to her with such force, such convincing animus, like it had been a pronouncement from the Lord.

* * *

That morning, Pamela walked through the nearby park on her way to work. The sprinklers must have gone off in the night and mud squished unpleasantly under her shoes. The squelch of dirt, the soft give of the ground under her feet, had begun to unnerve her. To sink into dirt so wet was to drown. To be lost.

She took refuge for a moment at the park bench, curling her legs up so her feet rested on the wood. She tried to brush her hair out of her face, forgetting, in that moment, that her hair was mostly spines. Her fingers snagged on something and without thinking she pulled, gasping as it came loose. The separation was jagged, fraught, a shock accompanied by a sharp pain.

She picked up the thing that had so recently been part of her — a small chunk of skin, no longer than her pinkie nail. It was covered in spines so small and delicate as to be nearly invisible, dotting the azure surface like whitecaps on the ocean.

This must be one of her lumps. She’d run her hands over them after Lydia had left this morning, and she had thought about going to the doctor, and wondered if this was how she did pimples now, and then she had simply forgotten about it.

She studied it, becoming more certain. It lay completely still in the palm of her hand, tiny and prickly and stubbornly alive. Hard and round and genderless, with tiny spines that looked as soft as cuticles, ready to sprout and grow. Pamela set it on the ground by the foot of the bench and walked away from it, feeling freed.

* * *

Pamela slipped into the back of the auditorium, nearly fifteen minutes into the play. She’d spent almost an hour after work trying to arrange her spines, putting on makeup and then taking it off, appalled at the garish sheen of the powder over sea glass skin.

Lydia knelt in the front, gesturing encouragingly at a small girl who seemed to have been struck with stage fright. Taking one of the metal folding chairs in the very last row, Pamela scanned the audience. She wasn’t sure what Lydia had told her coworkers — if she would be facing cartoonishly exaggerated support or suppressed discomfort.

To her right sat a woman, Tiffany blue, her skin haloed by light white fuzz, without a single spine. Her legs were crossed at the ankle and though she didn’t move one bit, Pamela’s eyes kept finding their way back to her.

It wasn’t difficult to get the permit, if you were of age and could pass a psychology test. The latter was made easier by a cottage industry of notaries, lawyers, and quasi-medical professionals. Sign away your life in waivers and visit one of the small stores — which were mandated to be a certain distance from the schools, just in case — full of various cactus clippings from lab-grown plants.

Pamela watched children sing and trip and dance and cry without seeing any of it. The curtain was not even all the way down before she turned to the woman, who also sat alone.

“Are you here for —” Pamela asked. She was strangely nervous. It wasn’t uncommon but Pamela had never met anyone in her social circles who had made the change.

“Malcolm,” the woman said and Pamela wondered if he was the reason she had eschewed spines. “Second grade. You’re Lydia’s wife?”

“Girlfriend,” Pamela said. “I’m Pamela.”

“Grace,” the woman said. “Nice to meet you.” She gave her a small, fixed smile and turned back to the stage.

Pamela blinked at her, full of questions the internet could only partially answer. Do you dream of deserts at night? Do you feel like your insides are changing, like spaces are hollowing out between or in place of your bones? Do you feel like a sea cave has been constructed in your rib cage, like you consist of crystalline structures slowly filling with water?

She turned back towards the stage and clasped her hands together, spines chafing in her gloves.

After, Lydia introduced her to new coworkers and some of the parents. Lydia didn’t wind an arm through hers, though that might have been the spines. Pamela shook hands with no one. When the principal congratulated her on being so progressive, Pamela smiled and pretended that she did not see the expression on Lydia’s face.

* * *

Pamela cleared their window box of geraniums the next day. She had purchased soil from a nursery and was patting it down around the little cacti, humming to them as she worked. Didn’t plants like music?

Lydia came up behind her. “Is this for clippings?”

“I’m shedding,” Pamela said. “Or budding.”

Lydia stroked one with the very tip of her finger, a movement so gentle it made Pamela feel squishy for the first time in weeks. “It’s illegal, isn’t it? To make more cacti?”

“These won’t become people or change people,” Pamela said. “They’re just what they seem to be.”

Lydia crossed her arms, then seemed to make herself uncross them with too much conscious effort. “I’m dealing with this badly, aren’t I?”

“There are support groups,” Pamela suggested.

“I didn’t know you were unhappy.” Then, looking at the planter, “I don’t understand.”

Pamela shrugged. She’d obsessed over the height of the saguaro, the wispy beard of the old man cactus, the plump lush fruit of the prickly pear. Had lain awake at night dreaming of a lifetime of deserts, the sort of wanting that could fill up the emptiness of Death Valley, of the Sahara.

* * *

It was a week later, maybe two, that she came home and Lydia’s things were gone. She should have been surprised or shocked. She should have dropped her bag and let her hands fly to her face, spearing them on the delicate spines in her cheeks.

Instead, she sat in the remaining blue chair. Lydia must have taken the matching chair, an equitable trade; she was fair-minded even in this. Pamela looked at the folded piece of paper on the coffee table. As if a woman who taught reading would ever leave without a note.

She wasn’t sure where her new seedlings should go. Pamela only had one window box. Perhaps half of one, if Lydia had gotten to it too. She didn’t know much about how to raise a cactus, or what environment they liked best. She thought about that instead of reading the note.

She left it on the table that night. Washed her face in oil. She should have felt devastated and she kept waiting for the feeling to arrive, as impatient as a woman at a train station.

Instead, she spread herself all over the bed. Incapable of sawing it in half, Lydia seemed to have taken all of the expensive kitchen implements instead. Pamela let her mind wander, not thinking of the child she’d wanted, with dark eyes and ferocious spines, not thinking of the wife she’d wanted, strong and prickly, but instead thinking of the lumps on her back, the spaces inside of her.

Broken hearts leak water. What a waste.

Audrey R. Hollis is an MFA candidate at Purdue University and Fiction Editor at the Sycamore Review. She is a 2018 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and an attendee of Tin House Summer Workshop 2021. Her fiction has appeared or is upcoming in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other places. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana with her spouse and cat. She can be found on Twitter @audreyrhollis or at audreyrhollis.com.

Content Notes

Dandelion Wishes

Leora Spitzer

Dafna leaned her head back against the tree, letting her pencil fall to the ground. Sweat was beginning to pool between her breasts, and the tickle of grass against her calves was turning into more of an itch. Soon, it would be time to go home, back into the cool air conditioning, but right now standing up felt like a bigger chore than staying out in the heat. Absently, she plucked a silver dandelion and pursed her lips, considering. I wish I had someone to talk to, she thought, blowing the seeds into the wind, and then a moment later: I wish I believed there was any point in making wishes. 

“Of course there’s a point,” someone said. Dafna jerked, bumping her head on the rough bark. She had been quite sure she was alone in the little park. All of the neighbors who’d walked by had been thoroughly focused on their own lives. No one had even glanced in her direction, let alone entered the park. 

And then, of course, there was the minor detail that the voice had responded to her thoughts. While Dafna did frequently mutter to herself when she was alone, she was reasonably sure that this time she had not spoken aloud. 

A quick glance confirmed that there was no one else in sight. She shook her head firmly, wondering if she had gotten too much sun, and took a long drink from her water bottle. “When in doubt, hydrate” had been one of her mother’s favorite precepts, and it was honestly annoying how often it proved to help. 

Not this time, though. As soon as she had recapped the bottle, the voice said, “On the other hand, there’s no point in wishing for someone to talk to if you won’t talk, you know.” 

Dafna swallowed, squeezing the water bottle like it might be able to protect her. “I don’t like talking to people when I have no idea who or where they are.” 

“I’m the dandelion spirit, of course,” said the voice impatiently. And then she was there. 

If Dafna had been asked to imagine what a dandelion spirit would look like, she would have drawn someone tiny and slender like a dandelion stalk, with wispy silver clothes and hair. Instead, the spirit was as round and cheerful as the dandelion blooms. She did seem a little wispy around the edges, like an Impressionist figure in an otherwise-Realist painting, but she occupied the space of a person sized and shaped very much like Dafna herself — far more alike than Dafna would have imagined. None of the fairies in picture books or movies were fat, but apparently that had more to do with the biases of the illustrators than the body types of ethereal beings. 

If this was real. 

“The dandelion spirit?” Dafna repeated. If this was just a weird dream, she hoped it lasted. Her dreams lately had been filled with more storms than sunlight, and she could use a bit of whimsy. 

“Well, sure,” the spirit said, sitting in the grass beside her. There was a faint greenish tinge to her skin, and her windswept curls were a vibrant yellow. She wore a dress made of thousands of tiny petals, a braided flower crown, and silver dandelion fluff earrings that dangled from her slightly pointed ears. “When you make a wish on a dandelion seed, it doesn’t just happen, you know. Someone has to make it happen.” A wide grin stretched across her plump cheeks, and Dafna felt an answering smile blossom involuntarily on her own face.

She thought of other wishes she’d made on dandelion seeds over the years — charming childhood requests, but also teenage wishes that were mortifying in retrospect, and a few deeply intimate wishes that she never would have made if she had known someone was listening — and the smile froze in place. “Do you respond to all dandelion wishes?” she asked apprehensively. 

“Well, not all,” the spirit said, stretching out in a sunbeam like a cat. Dafna, who was used to trying to make herself smaller around other people, to take up less space, watched enviously — though admittedly her gaze was caught as much by the tantalizing hint of the spirit’s ample cleavage as it was by the unapologetic way she carried herself. “Just in this neighborhood. Anything larger would be unmanageable.” 

Dafna relaxed. She’d lived in a different city as a teen, so if someone had been listening, at least it was not someone she was currently expected to speak to. “You actually make wishes come true?” she asked. 

The spirit shrugged. Dafna’s eyes followed the curve of her shoulder, the sunlight glowing against her skin. “Only the little wishes,” she admitted freely. “World peace is rather out of my capacity, for example.” 

“What kind of wishes, then?” 

She grew serious, running a narrow furrow into the soil with a finger. “The most important wish is the wish of the flowers, but that’s always the same: that their seeds find a good safe place to land and grow. But after that, I do my best with the humans’ wishes. After all, they help me fulfill the flowers’ wish, so it’s only fair.” 

“That makes sense,” Dafna agreed. “What kind of human wishes do you grant, if not world peace?”

This time, her grin was conspiratorial. “You know that little boy who lives in the blue house?” 

Dafna nodded. She had never officially met the boy, but she had heard his dads calling, “Max! Don’t climb the neighbor’s tree!” or “Max, if you poke the roses, they will poke you back!” or “Max! No running in the street!”

To the spirit, she said, “You mean Max?”

“Yes, him. He wished for ice cream the other day, so I whispered to the ice cream man that it might be a good idea to drive down his street, and between the hot sun and Max’s excitement when he heard the music, it didn’t take his dads very long to agree to a treat.”

Dafna grinned, remembering the joy of licking melted ice cream off her fingers on a sweltering summer day while the truck’s tinny music faded into the distance. “Well done,” she said. 

The spirit glowed. Literally. “Why, thank you, I was quite pleased with myself for that one,” she said with no trace of modesty. It was the kind of response that would have irritated Dafna’s mother, but Dafna wished she could accept compliments on her work with that kind of poise, without always assuming the complimenter was just being kind or polite rather than genuine, allowing herself to admit to taking pride in her accomplishments.

“What else?” she asked. 

The spirit hummed, a sound rather like the crickets who sang in the park at night. “The old man in the house with the big porch swing wished that his roses would grow as well as the dandelions did,” she said. Dafna knew that Mr. Williams was not actually that old, but she also had the sense that he’d been waiting his whole life to be a crotchety old man puttering around in the garden yelling at people to get off his lawn, so she let it go. 

“Can you make roses grow?” she asked instead. 

“No one can make roses do anything they don’t want,” the spirit said. “They have to be flattered. But I was pleased that he’d noticed the good work I was doing with the dandelions, so I made the effort. It turned out they really wanted to be able to climb, so I gave the old man a dream about a garden full of trellises, and eventually, he gave it a try. They’re all much happier now.” 

Now that Dafna was thinking about it, she did vaguely recall seeing Mr. Williams building trellises earlier in the summer, and his roses were quite beautiful. She’d seen Max’s harried dads chase him out of Mr. Williams’ yard more than once. 

“I’m sure he was very grateful,” she said, deciding not to tell the spirit that Mr. Williams’ comment about the dandelions had most certainly not been intended as a compliment, even if he had been dispersing dandelion fluff at the time. 

“Well, he took all the credit for his genius, of course, but I know what I did and that’s enough for me,” the spirit said, her curls bobbing gently in the wind. She looked at Dafna thoughtfully. “Want to hear another one?”

“Yes, please.” 

The spirit pointed across the park. “You know the woman who lives in that house?” 

Dafna stilled. She didn’t know Eden Silverberg, not really. They had only spoken briefly, in passing. But she had noticed the single mother in synagogue, on the street, and in the supermarket, spotted the little bi pride flag pin she wore, seen the tender look she gave her toddler even when the child was screaming. Of all the intriguing glimpses Dafna had gotten into the other woman’s life, it was the wrinkle of familiar anxiety in her forehead that most suggested they might be able to understand each other deeply and that kept her from approaching, not wanting to demand any attention from someone who clearly had a full plate. 

The dandelion spirit was still looking at Dafna expectantly. “Yeah,” she said. “I know her.” 

“Well, she has this rock,” the spirit said. “A river-smoothed stone that fits in her palm. She calls it her worry-rock and carries it around in her pocket, and whenever she’s anxious, she turns it over in her hand a few times. It helps calm her down.” 

This one felt more personal than the other stories, and Dafna felt that she ought to stop the spirit, ought to refuse to intrude on Eden’s privacy, but she could not bring herself to form the words. 

“Anyway, she lost the rock for a while, and it was stressing her out. In a fit of whimsy, she made a wish to find it, even though she doesn’t believe in dandelion wishes and thinks she ought not to believe in the worry-rock’s power. But I found the rock very easily since it was awfully worried about being away from her. I managed to get the curtains at just the right angle at just the right time that a sunbeam lit up the spot under the counter where it had fallen, and she found it right away.” 

Dafna pictured Eden’s relief, the tension slipping away from her shoulders as she scooped up the stone. Not for the first time, the artist found herself wishing that she could be the one to soothe the other woman’s anxiety. She said, somewhat hoarsely, “I’m glad you were able to help her.” 

“Me too,” the spirit said, twirling a dandelion stalk between her fingers. Dafna had not seen her pick it. She held it out to the artist with a half-smile full of summer sunshine and the scent of warm earth. “One more?” she offered. 

Dafna accepted the flower. She looked again at the spirit, closed her eyes, and blew. A moment later, she heard the rustle of wind through the grass. “You’re doing just fine on your own, honey,” the spirit whispered into her ear, and pressed a firm kiss onto her cheek. 

When she opened her eyes, she was alone with the flowers. There was no trace of the spirit — even the blades of grass where she had been sitting stood tall. Dafna took another sip of water. Most likely she had fallen asleep and her subconscious had, for once, decided to give her something sweet. 

She looked down at her sketchpad, brushed dandelion seeds off the page, and bit her lip, considering. She picked up the pencil. 

* * *

Eden sat at the kitchen table, enjoying the quiet. Aaron had finally fallen asleep, and she knew she ought to use the break to pick up the toys he’d left all over the floor, or maybe wash the lunch dishes, but surely it would be okay to just sit and breathe for a moment. 

Then, someone knocked lightly on the door. Eden briefly considered ignoring it, hoping they would go away — but what if the visitor started knocking more loudly, or worse, rang the doorbell? She didn’t want to risk waking Aaron, not when he’d been so cranky and desperate for his nap, so she pulled herself up out of the chair and hurried to the front door. 

To her surprise, Dafna Shapiro stood on the stoop, smiling a little awkwardly and clutching a large sketchbook to her chest. Eden didn’t really know her, not in a way that mattered, but she knew of her. The large painting of the burning bush in the shul atrium that Eden regularly paused to admire was Dafna’s work. She’d thought about approaching the artist, but, well, Aaron was always demanding her attention, and what would she have to say to someone so talented, anyway? 

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Dafna said. She jerked her head toward the little park across the street. “I hope this isn’t too weird, but I’ve been sketching over there all morning, and I thought maybe you’d want this one.” She pulled a sheet of paper from the sketchbook and handed it to Eden, not meeting her eyes. 

It was drawn from the point of view of a ladybug or some other small creature close to the ground. Large, out-of-focus dandelions loomed in the foreground, leading the eye to the central image: a detailed and intricate rendering of Eden’s home. Dafna had even drawn the menorah that Eden had neglected to move from the windowsill in the months since Hanukkah had ended. The enormous plants lent a certain magical whimsy to the little house, which, in Dafna’s eye, looked warm and welcoming rather than the cluttered mess Eden knew it to be. 

“Thank you so much,” Eden said, tracing the lines with a light finger. “It’s beautiful.” 

“Oh, no trouble,” Dafna muttered. Just when Eden thought she was going to need to repeat the compliment, the artist squared her shoulders and looked up, unfolding her arms and letting the sketchbook fall to her side to reveal soft curves that Eden longed to sink into. “I mean, thank you,” she said clearly, smiling shyly. She had adorable dimples that Eden had never noticed before, and there was a smudge on her cheek, almost shimmering where the light hit it. The color and shape reminded her of how she and her friends used to paint each other’s skin with dandelions when she was a girl, or maybe of a lipstick stain from someone wearing an unusual shade. But there was a much more obvious explanation for an artist.

“Were you painting this morning?” she blurted. Dafna blinked, confused. “Just... you’ve got a bit of yellow on your cheek, right here.” She touched her own cheek on the spot. Dafna mirrored the gesture, surprise and an unaccountable wonder dawning in her deep brown eyes. Eden felt herself begin to flush. 

“Come in,” she urged. “If there’s one thing that I have plenty of, it’s wet wipes — you would not believe how sticky Aaron gets. And it’s been so hot out — I’ll get you some water, or lemonade if you’d prefer.” She waved off the other woman’s instinctive demurral. “Really, it’s the least I can do after you gave me this lovely work of art.” 

“It’s just a sketch,” Dafna protested as she followed Eden into the house. Eden closed the door behind her, looking again at the details in the drawing. She felt suddenly lighter, like a bit of dandelion fluff floating on the wind, sure to find a bit of fertile earth in which to plant itself. Holding the paper as tenderly as a fragile seed, she went to welcome the artist into her home.

Leora Spitzer is a queer Jewish writer and bibliophile. Her favorite things include waterfalls, queer speculative fiction, good food, and her pet snake, Princess Buttercup. Although she has never successfully kept a non-cactus house plant alive for more than a couple of months, she aspires to one day have an herb garden. You can find her on Twitter as @leora_hugs. 

Content Notes

The Princess and the P. Sativum

Jennifer Lee Rossman

The royal garden called to her on a rainy evening that smelled of petrichor and anticipation. She didn’t know it was the royal garden, as the flowers didn’t introduce themselves nor did they give an address, and, while she would later claim that she would have ignored their call had she known, that was a lie. A good florimancer never ignored a plant in need.

And so Dahlia — yes, a flower name for a flower witch, but she’d picked it herself and she quite liked it — set off into the downpour. Though she could hear and feel them from a distance, she would have to be close to the plants in order for them to hear her.

With invisible colors and odorless perfumes that existed only in her mind, the flowers led her through muddy countryside and woods and brought her to a hedge surrounding the largest garden she had ever laid eyes on. Though she could feel the various species and cultivars and had a general idea of what the garden would look like during the day, her breath caught at the prospect of how beautiful it must be when all the flowers were awake.

Finding the gate unlocked, Dahlia entered the garden and found the Atropa belladonna that had called to her. She knelt beside the anxious plant, further dirtying her already-ruined skirt, and brushed a hand across its petals.

“Big changes,” she whispered, giving voice to the belladonna’s concerns. Plants communicated with feelings and ideas, the occasional name if they knew the person well, leaving Dahlia to interpret precisely what they meant to say. “Bad changes. Why do you feel guilty?”

“You’re supposed to come in the front entrance.”

Dahlia jumped at the voice and looked up to see a man glaring at her from above his clipboard.

“I... I’m sorry,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “I was just —”

“They want all the princesses to come in through the front,” the man said, raising an eyebrow at her muddy clothing.

Princesses? Why on earth would he think she was a princess?

And then Dahlia noticed the castle looming above them, and the line of carriages decorated in the colors of neighboring kingdoms parked on the road leading up the hill. Of course. The prince’s humiliatingly misogynistic wife-selection soirée.

“You could’ve told me that was tonight,” she hissed at the belladonna. She raised her voice to a normal volume and started to tell the man that, as he no doubt had already surmised from her general appearance, she was no princess... but the plant stopped her with the powerful feeling that she couldn’t help them unless she went inside. 

“You better not be lying,” she muttered, and then said to the man, reluctantly, “I’m sorry, could you please take me to the other princesses?”

* * *

So maybe she didn’t look like a princess, dress like one, or — she sniffed her armpit — smell like one. That didn’t mean anything. People hadn’t thought she looked like a girl for most of her life, but that didn’t mean anything, either.

Not that Dahlia cared if anyone believed she was a princess, but if she could fool them for a little while, maybe she could determine what was distressing the plants.

The entry hall of the castle hadn’t changed much since Dahlia had been there on class trips. Impossibly tall ceilings, gorgeous carpeting she never felt worthy of stepping on, colorful tapestries covering almost every inch of the stone walls. This time, at least, she got to stand in line with the other girls — a dozen nervous princesses with hair tortured into place like topiary and dresses that sparkled like ice sculptures.

The plants in the castle vibrated with anxious energy, too: exotic potted Miltonia and Lilium, and even a few unfamiliar trees longing for the tranquility of past lives on a savanna somewhere far away. Dahlia had never felt such an overwhelming sense of dread and foreboding. They were afraid, not just for themselves but for the kingdom as a whole. If she could just get some time alone with a particularly chatty plant, she could figure out what was going on.

“What are we waiting for —”

The princess beside her, a tall blonde girl with a brilliant green gown, shushed Dahlia. She was prettier than any flower, but not quite as communicative.

A moment later, however, Dahlia had her answer. A sharp-featured woman swept dramatically into the hall, black and red cape fluttering behind her. She stood before the princesses, scrutinizing each one silently.

The queen.

Every plant in the castle cried out in terror.

* * *

The queen, who was to oversee the selection process as her son had taken ill, wasted no time dismissing princesses she didn’t approve of, pruning their chances at marriage with a flick of her wrist.

“Not pretty enough,” she would say, or, “Arms are too long.” “We don’t want freckles in our gene pool.” “That dress doesn’t flatter you.”

The girls who made it past her initial scrutiny still received a sneer or an eyeroll; clearly no one could reach the standards she’d set for her son’s future wife. Curiously, she didn’t so much as look at the tall blonde with the green dress, moving directly to Dahlia.

“Not a princess,” the queen declared.

Dahlia prickled, tired of people telling her what she was and wasn’t. She glanced at a nearby orchid for assistance; people let down their guard around things they didn’t think could judge them, so plants often had accurate insights about the people they were familiar with.

The orchid’s suggestion sounded like a good way to get kicked out even faster, but Dahlia had never known an orchid to lie. (Petunias were another story.) So she crossed her arms, looked up at the queen defiantly, and said, “Prove it.”

The hall fell into a deep silence, for everyone who couldn’t hear the plants cheering. The queen glared poisoned daggers at Dahlia. “I beg your pardon?” she asked, every word a challenge.

“That’s what this is, isn’t it?” Dahlia asked. “A competition to prove who is the best princess? So if I win, I’m a princess.”

The queen sneered, and her laughter sounded like it was made from broken glass. “Oh, this will be fun.”

* * *

Dahlia had no idea what to expect from the queen’s challenges, and was somehow still surprised.

One by one by one, like autumn leaves falling to the ground, the girls were eliminated from contention for being unable to complete such unprincesslike tasks as repairing a carriage wheel or tailoring a bodice. It was almost as if the challenges were designed to weed out the actual princesses.

But having been raised as a wainwright’s son and spending a lifetime secretly altering clothing meant for people with wider hips and breasts had given Dahlia the skills needed to pass each challenge. By the end of the night, only two princesses remained: Dahlia and the girl in the green dress, who the orchids told her was named Lark.

“For the final challenge,” the queen said, and hesitated, studying Dahlia as if trying to devise a task specifically for her to fail.

But wait. How did the orchids know the girl’s name? Unless...

Dahlia frowned at the flowers, trying to untangle the anxiety radiating from them. They knew her. Lark. She wasn’t the main source of fear — that honor was the queen’s — but they knew her enough to know she couldn’t be trusted.

Oh. Of course: it was a setup. The queen and Lark had rigged the entire competition. For what purpose, Dahlia hadn’t studied enough politics to make a guess, but nothing beneficial for the kingdom.

The queen’s gaze flicked between Dahlia and the orchid and back again, and a deadly kudzu smile crept across her face. “You aren’t a princess at all. You are a witch.”

Dahlia said nothing. Who said she couldn’t be more than one thing?

“The final challenge,” the queen said again, touching her fingertips together gleefully, “will be a surprise. Get some rest, girls. Tomorrow morning, one of you will have the honor of uniting our kingdoms.”

* * *

The bedchamber was utterly devoid of plant life. Dahlia was to share it with Lark on account of the other guest chambers being occupied by criers and dignitaries from other kingdoms; still, she found herself feeling desperately lonely and helpless. The cup of tea left on her bedside table was a kind gesture, but felt like a superficial comfort; she hadn’t touched it.

“Did the plants help you with the challenges?” the other girl asked, a silhouette on the gauzy curtains draped between bedposts. She didn’t sound accusatory so much as curious.

“How did you know —”

“You kept looking at plants like they were talking to you. Not hard to guess you’re a florimancer.”

“Oh. No, it wasn’t the flowers. I just know how to do those things.” Dahlia paused. “Did the queen help you?”

The silhouette stilled for a moment. “Plants have big mouths,” Lark muttered. “Look, my kingdom is suffering. I won’t apologize for doing whatever it takes to help my people, even if that means rigging a contest to marry a dying man.”

Briefly, Dahlia wondered why Lark would tell her these things, but the answer was obvious: she was nobody. Not even a real princess. Who would believe — 

Wait.

“The prince is dying?” she whispered. “I... I just thought he was sick.”

The belladonna’s guilt.

“She’s poisoning him,” Dahlia realized, her stomach twisting. “And when he dies, you’ll technically be in charge, but she’ll be the one with the power. You’ll just be an ornamental shrub, while she holds the pruning shears.”

Lark didn’t say a word, but the quiet, anguished sob from her side of the room spoke volumes.

“Did you know?” Dahlia asked, trying to determine if Lark could be trusted.

“Wondered.”

“And you still went along with it?”

“She’s willing to kill her own son, Dahlia. I didn’t know that for sure, but I didn’t trust her and I was scared of what she would do if I tried to back out.”

Dahlia looked at the cup of tea cooling on the bedside table. “Do you think she’s trying to poison me too? Maybe it’s a test. A real princess would expect assassination attempts?”

“I don’t know.” Lark’s voice trembled like the last stubborn dandelion seed in a strong wind. “Shouldn’t a real princess be politically savvy enough to realize she’s being played?”

Dahlia considered her answer as she got out of bed — terribly uncomfortable mattress, anyway — and went to the door. Locked. So escaping was going to be a little more complicated than she had hoped. She looked around the sparse room for anything that could be of use. “I think everyone needs to stop worrying about everyone else’s preconceived notion of what a princess is supposed to be,” she grumbled. “Or a woman, for that matter.”

“I’m not really sure I want to be either,” Lark said, getting up to help with the search.

“Then don’t be.” Dahlia put her hands on her hips. “I was kind of hoping for a trap door or something. A little mouse who could carry a letter for us.”

“Seriously? That was your plan?” Lark laughed. Or maybe cried. Something in between. “I guess realizing you’re a princess later in life, you don’t have the same experiences, like constantly being kidnapped and thrown in windowless rooms. That teaches you tapestries don’t move in the breeze unless they’re covering a window.”

* * *

Night obscured the distance to the ground, and Dahlia had the top half of her body hanging out the window before the light of a passing carriage gave her a sense of scale. Now she understood why the plants in the garden below were frantically warning her against this plan.

“Not going to work,” she reported to Lark, though she didn’t remove herself from the window right away. The air was cool and calm (if she tuned out the botanical anxiety buzzing around her) and she wanted to enjoy it for a moment before morning came, before the kingdom was turned over to a woman with eyes the color of blight.

The tower probably had a beautiful view of the countryside during the day. Dahlia was perfectly content to let some other princess enjoy it. She would take mud and grass under her feet any day.

“Can you talk to the plants?” Lark asked, joining her in hanging out the window. “Use them as your little messenger mice?”

Dahlia shook her head. “I’m sensitive to them, so I can hear them from far away. They can’t hear me unless I’m closer.”

And that was when she felt the leaf tickling her elbow.

She turned to discover a trellis on the side of the castle, the vines of a Pisum sativum twining around the wood. Most people would say that peas, even the varieties with climbing vines, couldn’t possibly grow tall enough to reach that tower window. But then, most people had said Dahlia couldn’t call herself Dahlia.

“Hello, my little friend,” she said, smiling. “I know it’s late, but we have a very important message we want you to pass to all the florimancers in the kingdom.”

* * *

The royal garden awoke, in splashes of color and cascades of perfume, to welcome the witches and the press and the public. The flowers watched in relief as the queen, dethroned under suspicion of attempted assassination, was removed from the castle in shackles. With holistic remedies sourced from the garden, the royal doctor declared the prince would make a full recovery, and the nightshade finally unclamped its leaves.

“What will you do now?” Dahlia asked, laying back on the grass that whispered her praises, much to her amusement. “Do you still want to marry the prince? To help your kingdom?”

Lark made a noncommittal noise, lying beside her with dew and mud staining her elegant green dress. “I don’t think I’m really a princess. I only try to be because everyone expects me to be. I think maybe...” She ran her hand across the grass thoughtfully, eliciting a joyful response from the blades. “Maybe I’ll try talking to him, see if we can work out some kind of trade system.” She smiled up at the sky, looking afraid but excited all the same in a way Dahlia recognized well.

“And about the other thing you told me...” Dahlia said. “If you want to try not being a woman, see how it feels, I have some guy clothes I can tailor for you. Can probably make a suit, too, just in case romance blooms during your trade talks and you decide to marry the prince anyway.”

“Thank you.” Lark smiled at Dahlia; she had a smile like the first daffodil poking up through the snow of a long winter. “But princes aren’t my type. I’m really more into witches.”

Jennifer Lee Rossman (she/they) is a queer, autistic, and disabled author from Binghamton, New York. Her work has been featured in over 30 anthologies, two of which she also co-edited. Find more of her work on her website jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com and follow her on Twitter @JenLRossman.

Content Notes

Sapspear Syrup

Bradley Scott

My mother once told me about a plant which she called the Trevalyan sycamore. It originated somewhere around Gamma Draconis, and it would fire its seeds into the atmosphere at the approach of winter. On the planets where they thrived, the season tended to be incredibly long and particularly harsh. Once launched, the seeds would spiral through space, nourished and propelled by the sun, until a suitable environment drew them in.

I’d wondered, at the time, what it would feel like to be one of those seeds, drifting through space, running away from harsh weather in search of a place to take root. But now, gazing out the window of the metal pod with a list of worst-case scenarios running through my mind, I thought I knew.

Trix sat in the seat opposite me, their straw-coloured hair — just like mine, just like Mom’s — a complete mess. With their shirt crumpled and their gaze absent, they tapped their fingers on the armrest. They reached down to grab their satchel and put their tablet away. I got a sharp glare and realised I’d inadvertently been looking at the painted green front of the bag.

“What?” They scowled.

“Nothing.” I looked away.

They’d covered it up with paint before I could see what the little bastards had written on there, and they still hadn’t told me what it had said. Undoubtedly one of those stupid slogans that sounded wholesome in theory but was actually some sort of coded traditionalist bullshit.

Trix tucked the bag away and threw themself back on their seat sullenly. “Isn’t it enough that you’re dragging me off to like the fifth planet we’ve moved to in three years? I don’t want to participate in some stupid welcoming ceremony.”

“Well, you’re going to.” I crossed my arms and exhaled sharply. “It’s a small community, and I’m going to be busy. You’ll need something to do. And friends to do it with.”

It wasn’t as if I’d been thrilled with all the moving either. Two of my last four jobs had been limited contracts — the best I could get, once I’d upped and dived out of my previous commitments. People didn’t care if you had family emergencies to deal with. All they saw was a flighty engineer. A risky investment. 

The third job, running environment regulator orbs in a swamp, had paid well, but I would have died if I kept doing it. Overwork and environmental toxicity were concerns, just like they had been at the other two places. But at this one the creatures lurking in the waters were a much more immediate threat, and too many of my colleagues were being eaten.  

The fourth job had paid so well that Jez didn’t have to work, and my duties had involved minimal interaction with others, so I’d loved it. For a while, anyway. But the people in our neighbourhood there were some of the worst humans — or individuals of any species, really — that I’d ever encountered. 

They’d seemed nice at first, but it wasn’t long before they took issue with our “modern values” and started trying to convince us that our love was wrong and that Trix had to conform to their ideas of gender. I never thought I’d feel nostalgia for the swamp monsters. But when I checked back, that position had already been filled. 

Jez and I had been fine. We could retreat into our home, keeping each other company, avoiding our bigoted neighbours and colleagues. But Trix was out there at school almost every day, dealing with all kinds of crap just because they didn’t stick to a pointless binary that belonged to the past. The graffitied bag had been the last incident, but it hadn’t been the first.

“I don’t want friends, okay?” Trix huffed. “People are shitty.”

Jez grinned, looking up from his tablet. His bronze skin was radiant against the stiff white fabric of his shirt, and his black curls were still as artful as they’d been when we’d started. I always found travel so stressful. Even when I set off for a journey well-groomed and neat, I’d usually degrade into a mess by the time we arrived at our destination. Jez might as well have just walked into the pod from lounging on a tropical beach all day. 

He nudged Trix’s foot with his. “Present company excluded, hopefully?”

“Of course, babe.” Trix winked at him and smiled. 

I didn’t know how Jez had done it. Trix had hated him the first time I’d brought him home. Now it felt as if I was being supplanted in my role as big brother. It was nice that Trix had someone in their life who they got along with, but I sort of wished it could have been me. I had a way of worrying over them — about schoolwork, or whether they were eating right and getting enough sleep — that just always seemed to enrage them, and I didn’t really know how to stop.

Trix turned to the cactus next to them, making sure it was secure in the cup holder of the transport seat. They were great with plants, and after having taken advanced botany modules at school for the last couple of years, they could keep even the most delicate thing alive. 

Not that this one was in any way delicate. You could probably drop it from a second story balcony and the only thing damaged would be the ground it landed on. The globular body was covered in horizontal stripes — black, grey, white, and green — and its spines were a cloud of silky hairs, floating around the spongy mass in the centre and shifting at the slightest breeze. Mom had classified it as a Rebutia siortuen, and it came from a planet that was apparently very wild and violent. It was one of the few things hardy enough to survive the spaceport biofilters, as well as the minor radiation and general environmental fluctuations inherent to space travel. 

So, naturally, we brought it along wherever we went — because it had been one of Mom’s, and because Trix would have raised hell if they didn’t get to bring at least one of our plants. The rest were in an eternal quarantine. I was paying a service to keep them warehoused and cared for, and I’d get them sent to us when we settled somewhere. Provided that we ever did. Until then, we had the cactus.

If I came too near it, the silky hairs would stiffen into needle-like spikes and sting me. Prying those horrid things out of my skin was a nightmare. In theory, once it had gotten used to you, it would let you near it — an evolutionary trait that would normally protect its symbiotic partners from predators. But I still got pricked by it all the time, unlike Trix and Jez. It was apparently all about being able to relax. That’s what Jez said, anyway. The two of them found it pretty funny that I seemed to be incapable of doing that. As if it were the easiest thing in the world to let go of the concern that the damn thing could stab you at any moment.

“I’m going to go check how close we are.” I got up and stepped across the compartment to the console, twisting my neck to release some of the tension. The display on the screen suggested we had five minutes to go, more or less. I leaned against the panel, sighing. Feeling an arm on my shoulder, I turned to find Jez.

“You okay, Cal?”

I nodded stiffly. “I just... I just really hope this one works out.”

“It will. I’ve heard good things about the Alluvi.”

“Yeah, rumours. And there’ll be humans there too. Remember how we tend to treat each other?”

“Ugh. Shut the grimness down, please. Not everyone is a narrow-minded eel. You said Em is happy there, right?” Jez stepped around to stand in front of me. 

“Yeah, it seemed that way in her messages.” I shrugged. 

The first letter, at least, she’d sent via private communications. It had been full of Em’s characteristic dramatic flair, with phrases like “amazing opportunity,” “desperately need you around,” and, most convincingly, “more money than you’ll ever know what to do with.” It was a lifeline from an old friend that I’d needed at the time, and I’d grabbed hold of it. But I couldn’t shake the worry — however unreasonable Jez thought it was — that I hadn’t made the right decision.

“Well, there we are. Would she put up with the crap we’ve been dealing with?”

“No.”

“Exactly. It’ll work out.” He moved his hands onto either side of my neck and poked my jaw with his thumb, tilting my head up to look him in the eye. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll move on, okay? You’re incredibly employable, after that swamp gig on Skrik. We’ll find somewhere else in like a week if this is not the right place.”

“We’ve already tried so many places, and the people have all been horrible. And you heard Trix —”

“They just like to complain. Like you. Must be genetic.” He gave me a soft smile. “You’ve told them about the plants, right?”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “Wasn’t a great conversation. It’s probably why they’re ticked off with me today.”

“Well, they’re prepared. That’s what’s important.” He nudged my shoulder softly. “Come on, stop panicking. We’re not even there yet. You’re both such pessimists.”

I let him draw me into a hug, took a steadying breath, and the cool, comforting scent of his cologne flooded my nostrils. He even managed to smell great throughout a pod-flight. I kissed him on the forehead. “Okay. We should sit down. I think we’re going to land soon.”

Sure enough, not long after we’d taken our seats, the announcement came that we’d arrived at the planet of Nutun. We waited while the craft shuddered down to the surface.

Trix tapped Jez’s leg with their foot. “Hey, what are you even going to do on this stupid farming station? There can’t be restaurants on this hell-hole, can there?”

“There’s a restaurant,” I said defensively.

“One restaurant? That’s not the brilliant comeback you think it is.” They smirked, and I pursed my lips.

“I shall lead a life of leisure.” Jez threw his arms out and put on an affected, stuffy accent. “I shall drink wine and write poetry. I shall paint and recline all day by the pool.” 

“You didn’t tell me we have a pool.” A slight smile broke out on Trix’s face.

“I did, actually.”

“It was part of the ‘moving logistics’ lecture you tuned out.” Jez winked. “But yeah, we have a pool. Your brother’s loaded now. We got the best house.”

We got the only available house, I wanted to add. But Trix seemed happy with the idea, and I didn’t want to ruin it. They gently stroked the siortuen cactus, looking thoughtful, as the compartment began to rumble and the speaker system asked us to please remain seated while the shuttle finished docking.

“Okay, so maybe I like that we have a pool now.” Trix leaned forward and poked Jez’s knee. “But is that seriously what you’re going to do all day?”

“Whatever, I’ll figure something out. Cooking for you two idiots is a full-time job anyway. The crap you’d eat if I wasn’t around...” Jez shook his head. “Junk food and the occasional nutrient-cube to fend off scurvy. Tragic.”

An announcement rang through the steel compartment telling us the doors were about to open. I grabbed my bag and reached for Trix’s, but they snatched it away before I could get to it, giving me a dirty look. The strap of their satchel started to slip off their arm while they were picking up the cactus, causing them to nearly lose their balance as they struggled to keep the pot from bumping into the wall. I sighed and Jez gave me a sympathetic grimace. 

Trix barged out of the shuttle, and we followed in their wake, plunging through the momentary buzz of the biofilters as we exited the pod and emerged into the terminal. Soft blue carpets stretched across the small, neat space, sectioned off by the orderly rows of gleaming metal chairs. A warm glow from the walls lit the entire space, and there were no windows to provide us with a glimpse of the world outside. Frosted glass doors at the far end of the terminal were the only source of natural light.

As we made our way down the ramp, the only person in the room stood up to greet us. Em looked amazing. Her hair had gotten so long since I’d last seen her, and she was wearing a red jumpsuit that perfectly suited her broad smiles and sparkling laughter. She ran up to crush me in a hug that was far more powerful than you ever would have expected from someone who looked that dainty.

“Cal-culator! It’s been ages!” She pushed me back slightly, her braids swaying as she placed her hands on her hips and gave me an appraising once-over. “You still look just the same.”

“Hey, Em.” I beamed. I’d almost forgotten about that nickname. Our recent messages had been very formal, since they’d all had to happen via professional channels. “Wish I could say the same, but you seem to have gotten younger.” 

“Oh, you dirty charmer. Cut it out. I’m a married woman now.” She showed me the gold band on her ring finger. “How long has it been since I’ve seen you? Six years?”

“Congratulations, by the way. Glad Ant finally let you bully him into it. It’s actually been seven years, I think.” I counted back in my head. “Yeah, that internship on the Gehu station.”

“Right.” She swatted at my arm. “You could have written more, you know.”

“Yeah, sorry.” I shrugged. “Been a rough few years.”

“Yeah.” Her smile faded. “Sorry. I heard about your mother. You doing okay?”

“Yeah, we’re... getting on with things. You know.” I cleared my throat. “Thanks so much for the job offer, though.”

“Oh please, I’m so out of my depth here. I’ve got the energy generation covered like you wouldn’t believe, but it takes me hours to get the farm-orbs working right when they go down, or we make some changes to the environmental regulation formulae. We were struggling to find anyone. I consider you being here a massive favour.”

“Well, I’m happy for the opportunity.” I’d probably have to explain our situation a bit better later. If it didn’t turn out to be a good place for Trix, I wasn’t planning on hanging around once my initial contract expired. But from what I’d seen in the specs, even sticking around a month might be a huge help. If we had to move on, hopefully Em would understand. “Plus, the money’s good.”

“Man, you’re telling me? My folks have been living like royalty back home, and it’s barely made a dent in my account.” She smiled. “Is this the famous Jez?”

“Yes.” I turned towards Jez and Trix. “This is Emma. We go way back, we were in the same year at the academy. Em, this is my kid sibling Trix, and my husband Jez.”

“Yeah, I remember Trix. Last time I saw you, you were seven or something. Just a little baby.” Em held her hand up to indicate how tall Trix might have been at the time. They just shrugged and avoided eye contact. Em took it in stride. “And Jez, it’s so great to finally meet you. Back when Cal wasn’t so bad at keeping in touch, I used to hear so much about you.”

“Only good things, I hope. Or impressive things, if they were bad.” Jez grinned broadly. “I’ve heard a lot about you too, of course. The famous Em, terror of the Gehu station. The center of gravity for Cal’s long-forgotten social life, and one of the few people who could beat some fun into him.”

“Okay, we’re not doing this right now.” As far as I was concerned, they could bond by making jokes at my expense later. “Don’t we have a welcoming ceremony to get to?”

“Oh, it’s very casual. Just a handful of people from the company and their families.” Em chuckled. “We have some time to make fun of you for being uptight.”

I sighed. “Can we do it while walking?”

“Hates being late. That’s always been a thing.” Em shook her head at Jez and smiled, but we did start moving out of the station, if only because I was charging ahead anyway. 

“And then we usually show up at the event too early, and wait two hours for everyone else to arrive.” Jez tutted, and Trix laughed.

“No sense of drama,” Em said, clutching her hand to her heart with an exaggerated sigh.

“No? You should see him when I forget to clean up after myself in the kitchen.” Jez chuckled. “Lots of drama there.”

I pushed on while the three of them cackled behind me, and we made our way out into a glass tunnel suspended above the planet’s surface.

Entwined around the glass walls of the tube was a verdant and overgrown jungle. The branches of gargantuan trees twisted and twirled through each other until I could no longer follow which appendage belonged to which trunk. Most of the surface of each branch was riddled with leafy growths of every colour on the spectrum, which in turn had smaller plants growing off them. Even though the flowers struggled to compete with the vivid surrounding foliage, their occasional presence provided a geometric texture that drew the eye back and forth. I could have spent hours trying to decipher a meaning to the pattern.

Equally bright creatures scuttled, darted, and flitted around the branches, in a dance as lively as it was unpredictable. The whole rainbow waved gently in the breeze, creating a symphony of colour that screamed of life. The vibrant scene rippled and shifted in the dappled light that filtered through the canopy overhead.

“Wow,” Trix said, turning around to take more of it in. 

“Yeah, it’s quite something, isn’t it?” Em laughed gently at our awed expressions. “This place is aggressively fertile. The heat and humidity out there is awful, though. I do not recommend going outside. You’ll live, but you might not want to.”

We made our way through the giant glass tube, sped on by moving walkways on the floor that sent us zooming past the lush scenery.

“The way to your house is a bit of a walk. We’ll drop by Cal’s new office first, so you three can leave your bags there before the welcoming ceremony.” Em noticed Trix rolling their eyes. “Humour us, kid. We’re a small community and the Alluvi like to be friendly — it’s probably rubbed off on the rest of us, too. Plus, it’s just company people and their families. All very relaxed.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.” Trix stared awkwardly at their feet. They probably hadn’t thought Em was paying attention to them, and were now embarrassed to be caught out being rude. Jez raised his eyebrows and gave me an amused look from behind them, and I suppressed a laugh. 

“Anyway, here we are,” Em announced as we got off the last walkway. 

We stepped out of the glass tunnel. Instead of the metal floor you’d expect from a station suspended in the sky, we’d walked onto a stone path that cut through actual grass, which stretched away from us on both sides in a colossal ring. 

There was an enormous glass dome in the centre of the ring that looked down to the forest floor far below us. Its curvature was echoed by the much bigger dome enclosing the whole space, the standard frame of steel and glass triangles that protected stations like this from the elements. 

Metallic buildings of varying sizes dotted the grass ring, along with decorative touches like potted plants and water features. It was very luxurious to my mind, since stations like this were usually kept to the bare minimum. Even coating and polishing everything was usually more than most organisations cared to invest in.

Em led us over to the inner dome, and we approached the barrier to study the scene it looked down upon. Lined up on the planet’s surface, so far below us, were massive, fleshy, red things — vaguely fin-shaped, alive and plump. At the foot of each of these stood a white farm-orb, flashing blue lights on one side, pierced in several places by roots rising from the earth at the feet of the scarlet monstrosities. Silver pipes connected each orb to the next, and the chain stretched off into the distance.

I’d known what plants I’d be working with, but actually seeing them still made my breath catch. I shared a quick look with Trix, who looked like they were having a similar reaction. We’d both tried to prepare ourselves for the fact that we’d encounter one of Mom’s discoveries, but the reality would take a bit of getting used to.

Trix reverently put their hands on the railing around the inner dome, and studied the plants below. “Crassulaceae monolitus,” they breathed, eyes wide. “But they’re massive. How do you keep them alive?”

“Don’t ask me.” Em grinned ruefully. “Cal’s predecessor set those orb-things up. I’ve been keeping them running since the old guy left, but I have no idea what it is they actually do.”

“They regulate the environment.” I knew a bit more about what it took than that, but even I usually just tried to keep the things working efficiently and didn’t worry too much about the “how” of it all. The botanists figured out the formulae, and I implemented them.

“Whatever the hell that means.” She laughed, and slapped me on the shoulder.

“The soil and humidity here probably does most of the work, so it’ll be a responsive element,” Trix said softly, and I smiled proudly. They were going to go into botany when they were out of school, just like Mom. “They’re overly sensitive to environmental threats, so they release an enzyme. My guess is that the spheres will send the appropriate chemical response — sort of reassuring the tree. Otherwise the enzyme builds up and they poison themselves, and everything around them. Mom used to call them Worry Wort.” Trix turned to me and smirked. “It was also her nickname for Cal.”

I sighed. “Em, you said something about an office?”

“Sure, this way.” She waved us forward onto a nearby path, guiding us past some of the buildings. 

Potted plants lined the way, echoing the vibrant colours outside. In the more temperate environment inside the dome, they seemed a lot more orderly and controlled, staying within the bounds of their pots and not latching onto their neighbors. Where the flora outside was wild, independent and exuberant, the greenery indoors made me think of the care and attention that went into their upkeep. I’d never worked anywhere this beautiful.

“So what do you call them?” Trix asked.

Em blinked. “What do we call what?”

“The Crassula — the plants. What are they called here?”

“Ah, right. Sapspear trees. We used to call them devilsrib, but marketing wasn’t having it.” She shook her head. “Sapspear syrup. Yeah, you can tell an ad guy came up with that. Sounds more like a brand than a plant.”

Jez raised his eyebrows. “Cal says most of it comes from this place.”

“Yep. Only known planet where it’ll grow year-round. We’re in high demand.”

“Well, that explains the price,” Jez said. “We got about half a drop of it at this restaurant where I used to work. But it was only for the Zengir ambassador. Even her husband didn’t get any. Not important enough.”

“Well, you can’t waste it on the rabble.” Em laughed. “But it’s really amazing stuff. You guys never tried any? I thought your mom discovered the damn thing.”

“The little one she had wasn’t big enough to produce sap, and it —” Trix cut themself off. “We don’t have it any more.”

I nearly winced. The plant had died right after Mom. Trix and I hadn’t known enough to keep it alive. I clenched my jaw and tried not to relive it. Any of it. 

Jez quickly grabbed my hand, keeping up a cheerful chatter. “And if we could afford to buy Sapspear syrup, Cal definitely wouldn’t be working here. Or at all.”

“It does get pricey, off-world. Lucky for us, right, Cal?” She clapped me on the back.

“Have you had some?” Jez asked, to which Em gave a quick nod. “What’s it like?”

“Really amazing. It’s sweet, but not cloying. It wakes you up and relaxes you at the same time.” She stopped walking, and gestured grandly in front of her. “Anyway, here we are. Cal’s new base of operations.”

I studied the structure she’d led us to. It was a little small for an engineering building, not much bigger than the transport we’d just been on. My office would probably be a tiny cubicle in a building this size. Not exactly unusual, but I’d gotten used to a space that was at least big enough to move around in — if only just — at my last job. But the path was nice, the air was clean, and there was a fountain outside the front door that made a soothing gurgle. The water at the base wasn’t even big enough for a swamp monster to be lurking inside. Definitely a more hospitable work environment than I was used to. 

“It’s in there?” I asked.

Em chuckled. “No, honey, this is the office.”

“Seriously?” Looking through the windows, I could just about make out that it was a single room. I had a clear line of sight through to the large glass panel on the other side, and the beautiful garden view that it offered. “Wow... my last office was basically a storage locker.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling.” Em spread her arms grandly. “Welcome to the lap of luxury.”

“Hah. Thanks.”

She led us into the room and turned on some lights while we all dumped our bags by the door. It was very expensively furnished for an engineer’s office. Trix handed their siortuen cactus to Jez and threw themself down on the plush, purple couch against one wall with a delighted noise. Jez crossed to the other side of the room, carefully set the plant down on the desk, and went to stand by the window to admire the scenery. I only had eyes for the workstation at the back.

“Having a moment?” Em winked at me.

I chuckled. “What do you think?” 

I was nearly bouncing as I made my way down the line of equipment. Soldering station, simulation chamber, rapid prototyping machines — both additive and subtractive manufacturing — a computer terminal with a huge screen, a full pollical-standard toolset, and something at the end of the row that I could only guess the purpose of, but knew I wanted to find out.

“Do you want a quick rundown of the equipment before we go to the party?” Em asked.

“Come on, I know what this stuff is. I’ve been working in some crappy places, but I still have my dreams.” I looked over at the last machine. “Although I admit I have no idea what that one does.”

She let out a loud burst of laughter. “Oh, man. That one’s a coffee machine.”

“Oh! Right.” I smiled sheepishly. “Very important engineering tool.”

“Exactly.” Em giggled, and wandered over to the window to start telling Jez about the things people did for fun on the station. I allowed myself a few moments to run my eyes over the various workbench machines. I chuckled when I saw a little button on the last one with a picture of a coffee cup on it. 

Glancing at the clock, I noticed that I’d spent more time there than I’d meant to, and I was already worried that we’d kept everyone waiting far too long. I leaned on the desk, tapping my fingers on the surface impatiently, and waited for Jez and Em’s chatter to lapse long enough for me to get a word in.

“Shouldn’t we get going?” I really didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the Alluvi.

“Cal, watch out,” Jez said sharply.

I looked down to the desk, and snatched my arm away just in time as the siortuen’s spines shot out, suddenly rigid and aggressive.

Trix sighed, hopping off the couch. “Let’s go. Cal’s going to have a heart attack if we don’t.”

Jez pecked me on the cheek affectionately as we all started making our way out. I smiled at him and rubbed the back of my neck, letting out a deep breath. Em shut the door behind us, and led the way towards the other side of the dome from where we’d come in. 

We took the left branch of a fork in the path that led us down a winding garden route. Still under the big dome, we emerged into a park area. I could almost forget I was in an artificial structure up in the air when I saw the open, grassy grounds framed by small copses of trees. A marquee tent stood in the largest flat patch of grass, and around it milled a small crowd of people, about half of whom were human.

It was probably the first time Trix, Jez or I had laid eyes on Alluvi, although we’d all met plenty of other non-humans before. You learned not to stare, and to take social cues from everyone around. It was only polite. 

“What are the Alluvi like?” I whispered to Em as we approached.

“I’ve told you, they’re great.”

“Yeah, but —”

“They host dinner parties, and bring you presents on your birthday. They garden and play video games in their free time. They’re people, Cal. And pretty great ones at that. Will you relax?” She tutted.

“Fine.” I forced myself to unclench my jaw and subtly studied the Alluvi in the group as we approached. 

They didn’t look that unusual, which made sense, given how close to Earth their home planet was in the Genesis Belt. They were definitely humanoid, and about our size, although maybe a little bit shorter on average. The two main differences were both elements of colouring — every Alluvi’s skin was a different shade of green, and their eyes were completely black, with no irises.

Em led us up to the group. “Okay, everyone. This is Cal, he’s going to be our new ground-level guy. This is his husband Jez, and his sibling Trix. They’re going to be staying with us too.”

Everyone greeted us, and Em grabbed my arm. “So forgive Cal, because he will forget your names at least once. But I’m just going to run through everyone quickly, so he can start to get a feel for who’s who. You remember Anthony.” She nodded to a pale, skinny guy with dark hair, and he and I shared a semi-familiar greeting. 

Em introduced us to the other humans first. They all seemed very friendly, not that that always meant anything. The people at my last job had all seemed very friendly too, in the beginning. One of the couples was two women, though, and I had to stop myself from letting out a melodramatic sigh of relief. After I’d shaken their hands, I noticed Jez giving me a look that told me he knew what I was thinking. 

Then Em got to the four Alluvi. “This is Yomoy. They run the supplies depot, so you better be nice to them. Then there’s Vetev. They’re all over the planet these days, but that’s more for the stuff I need — you should be covered, materials-wise. Then there’s Turut, they’re our translator-in-chief when we need to speak to non-Alluvi, so we make them deal with all the off-world traders. And this sapling is Sicis, they’re sort of Turut’s apprentice.”

All of them shook my hand in turn, and gave me warm smiles and a few words of welcome. I glanced back at Trix, who had gone very quiet, and was looking down at their feet. 

Yomoy nodded amicably. “Trix will probably want to meet their schoolmates.” They turned to face a group of what looked like teenagers a short distance away — both human and Alluvi — and raised their voice. “Girig, come say hello.”

The tallest Alluvi of the group hurried over to the tent. 

“Girig,” Yomoy said. “This is Cal, Jez, and Trix. Trix will be joining you for classes.”

“Hello!” Girig waved cheerfully to all of us, and then focused their attention on Trix. “It’s nice to meet another human. How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Trix mumbled.

“I’m sixteen too, in human years,” Girig said softly. “Des over there is like us, but Justin is a boy and Sue’s a girl. Do you do that?”

“No, I —” Trix cleared their throat. “No, I’m also like you.”

“Well, come on.” Girig gestured towards the crowd of teenagers. “I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

“Uh, yeah. Okay.” Trix ran their hand through their hair, and gave me a flickering smile before running off with Girig.

“Here, Cal, you have to try this.” Em handed me a small, fluted glass containing a viscous red liquid.

“Is this —”

“Surprise!” She smiled broadly, and handed Jez the other glass she’d been holding. “We get overflow sometimes when we’re filling the tanks on the freighters, and we’re not allowed to put it back in the general storage vats or sell it, so we’re always swimming in the stuff. We thought you might like to try some.”

Jez nodded gratefully as Em handed him the glass, a dreamy expression on his face. Knowing him, he’d already started running through his favourite recipes, thinking about which ones he could modify to include this exciting new ingredient.

I looked at my glass sceptically. I’d heard things about this syrup, and while it wasn’t classified as a true intoxicant, the rumours persisted that it made those who drank it feel calm and happy. I wasn’t sure I trusted that. But it would have been rude to turn it down. Everyone else there seemed to be drinking some.

Jez chuckled at my expression, and we both raised the glasses to our lips and drank. My tastebuds sang and warmth flooded through my body. For a second it almost felt as if I was part of that lush forest outside, woven into the rich tapestry of colours. The tension in my shoulders disappeared, and an involuntary sigh escaped me.

“I’ve died and gone to paradise. It’s the only explanation.” Jez sighed dramatically. “That’s amazing stuff. Flavourful, balanced, delicate. I’ve never had anything quite like it.”

“Savour that glass, and give it a while before you go for a refill.” Yomoy chuckled heartily. “Drink too much, and you’ll be violently ill afterwards. Trust me.”

“Cal, what’d you think?” Em asked.

“Um, I liked it. It was very sweet.”

Jez laughed, shaking his head and putting his arm around me. “Troglodyte.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, but I couldn’t help laughing along with him. After that, we started mingling. Vetev had apparently read the paper I’d put out about my capstone project at the academy, and they were very excited to pick my brain about closed-environment regulators. Turut promised to get Jez in touch with the head chef at the restaurant, who they thought could use the help. 

We received three separate dinner invitations, to Jez’s obvious delight. No doubt once he’d set up properly in our kitchen, we’d be sending out our own invitations, and the culinary one-upmanship would begin.

After a while, Trix popped up at my side, tapping at my shoulder with the palm of their hand.

“Yes?”

“I need my tablet,” they said.

It seemed a little early for them to bail on the party and sit there staring at a screen. I frowned. “Why? Don’t you want to —”

“I just need it, okay?” They sighed heavily. “We’re going to this CAVE thing.”

“Cave?”

“Yeah, it’s like a... video-game-thing, but it’s the whole room. It sounds really cool. Can I get my tablet?”

I turned to Em, who was sitting next to me. “Is the office open?”

“Oh yeah, we don’t lock stuff here.” She nodded encouragingly at Trix. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” They smiled and ran off. 

I looked at their retreating back for a second, and then turned to Em. “I’m just going to make sure they can find it. Messy packer, you know.”

I hurried after Trix, but they were a fast runner these days and I was out of shape, so by the time I’d huffed my way to the office they were already rifling through their bag. I could hear them sniffing slightly as I tentatively stepped across the threshold. 

“Hey, kiddo, you okay?”

“Um, yeah.” They were turned away from me, but I saw them wipe their face with a sleeve. “Yeah, sorry. I’m just... getting my stuff, like I said.”

“Why are you crying? Did someone say something shitty? I —”

“Cal!” Trix sounded exasperated. “Seriously. No, everyone’s been great. I’m mostly happy, okay? Just thinking about Mom, a bit, and... it’s fine. I’m really okay.”

I felt a pang of guilt. I was failing them all the time. Even their shoes looked a bit old. How long had it been since I’d bought them a new pair? I tried to focus. “You can talk to me, you know.”

“Can I, Cal?” They pulled their green-painted satchel out of the mess of their belongings and turned to face me, crossing their arms. “Because you shut down whenever I mention Mom. You go into full freakout and start worrying about nutrient cubes and air filter replacements and stupid shit like that.”

I stood there, stunned and speechless. They shoved a few of the things lying around back in their pack, and closed the lid. 

I cleared my throat. “I’ll try to stop that. I promise.” 

“We’ll see,” they said grimly, staring out the window. “You’re drunk on that Sapspear stuff right now, anyway.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But seriously, Trix. It’s just that I feel like...” I swallowed with difficulty. My chest was tight, and the room felt too warm, but I didn’t want to let things pass unsaid. Not again. Maybe it was the Sapspear syrup. Yomoy had warned us it was strong. But it always felt impossible to talk to Trix, so I thought I might as well try, now that I felt like I could. “Like I have no idea what I’m doing. Mom was so good with everything. She even got me to calm down, sometimes. And you were so happy with her on the research vessel, and then... well, then the best I could give you was crappy little rooms on junky space stations, and —”

“Cal, you need to stop this. Okay?” Trix exhaled sharply, turning to face me. “You were happy jetting around the universe with Jez. But then I got dropped on you, and bye-bye fun Cal. I just feel like a massive burden sometimes.” Their gaze dropped to the floor.

My chest tightened even more, and I felt a bit dizzy. I guess I’d just thought they found me annoying. I had no idea what it was really about. “Shit, I’m so sorry.”

“Cal, it’s fine. Honestly, I’m fine.”

“Sorry.” I managed a teary smile. “You’re one of my favourite people in the universe, and you could never be a burden on me. Never. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way.” I sighed. “I just want you to be happy.”

They didn’t say anything, at first, just walked up and wrapped their arms around me. I stifled a sob, and brought up my hand to tousle their hair. We weren’t big huggers. Mom had been, but the two of us were always squirming our way out of it. I hadn’t realised how much I’d needed to be reminded of her. I wrapped my other arm around Trix, and relaxed into the hug.

“I think I can be, here.” They pulled back slightly, and looked up at me. “Can you promise to lighten the hell up for like a week and let me try?”

“Yeah, okay.” I laughed weakly, and let them go. 

They unwound their arms and adjusted the strap of their tablet bag on their shoulder. “They’re probably waiting for me.”

I nodded, and stepped out of the doorway to let them pass. “Have fun. Love you.”

“Thanks. Love you too.” They smiled. No irony or annoyance this time, as far as I could tell. I didn’t think I’d seen a look like that from them since I’d left home to go to the Academy. With one last glance back at me, they headed out of the office.

I wandered over to the desk and sat down on the edge, feeling lighter than I had in years. Bowing my head and closing my eyes, I took a moment to just feel the smooth surface of the wood under my hands, my fingers tracing gently along the subtle grain. I could smell hints of the perfumed garden air that had drifted in from outside. There was something else, too, a gentle motion against the skin of my forearm.

I opened my eyes and saw the spines of the siortuen cactus — soft, silky, and swaying gently from the force of my breath — wafting against my arm like it was trying to comfort me. A shocked, shaky laugh escaped me as I ran my hand back and forth over the fluffy halo, marvelling at this newfound truce.

“Everything all right in here?” 

I glanced up to the door. Jez was leaning against the frame, giving me a searching look. His eyes drifted down to the cactus and the corners of his mouth twitched up. 

“Yeah.” I beamed at him. “Yeah, I think everything’s going to be fine.”

“You want to get back to the party?”

If we waited a bit, I could give Trix time to run off to play video games with their new friends in peace. I stroked the spines of the cactus. “Not just yet.”

Bradley Scott is an electronics engineer who dreams of electric sheep. (But not in, like... a weird way.) He lives with his amazing and supportive partner in Stellenbosch, South Africa, surrounded by good wine and good people. Writing was something he thought he’d left behind, but his plans changed when the pandemic hit. If you like MM romances that are sweeter than they are steamy (but still a little bit of both), fantasy steeped in historical parallels and court intrigue, and sci-fi that started out as thinly veneered Star Trek fan-fiction, then his work might just be for you. You can check out his self-indulgent ramblings on his blog at bradleyscott.co.za, and you can make bird noises at him on Twitter @BradleyScott555.

Content Notes

A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting

Charles Payseur

It’s spring when you arrive, or what passes for it in the Northwoods. The ground is still frozen because otherwise, you’d have to wait months for it to dry to get all the equipment in. It’s cold and your knuckles split from having to swing the axe in the dry air, but it beats Milwaukee. Beats packing meat and avoiding the mean looks and having to fight for an extra blanket at the boarding house. It’s just a skeleton crew this early, you and ten others and not even a real camp because you have to build it before the others can arrive. But it’s extra pay and you don’t mind the work or the company. You’re paired off in tents, and Holstegg and you have found excellent ways of staying warm.

The first thing you need to look for is the flower. Every dryad has one that blooms year-round, even in this snow-blasted place. They hide them, though, so you have to look closely, circle each tree in a slow dance of intent. Sometimes it’s only the smallest of things, a snow-white bloom where there should be only evergreen. Or a splash of fire-red in a sea of oak.

Holstegg tells you of life on a farm, twelve siblings, and no neighbors for a day’s walk in any direction. You shiver and he pulls you to him, his chest broad and his blond beard tickling the back of your neck. And he tells you the stories his parents would weave of the old country, of magic and witches and talking bears. You ask if there were any blond ones and the sound of his laughter echoes through the camp.

The second thing is the slow breathing. All trees breathe, and you’ll be able to see it if you’re around them long enough, but dryad breath is different, escapes out through a single concealed mouth, and if you wait long enough you’ll see the heat of it fog the crisp air.

You bathe in a cold stream and sometimes Holstegg has to break the thin sheet of ice with a rock. Never an axe, he knows, because that would promote rust. You try to wash yourself clean but sex still tastes like pine sap and sweat. It’s the happiest you’ve ever been. The other men at camp know full well what you’re about, you and Holstegg, but most of them believe it’s just something men do out here, in the woods. That it’s some sort of skin you’ll remove when you get back to where you can buy a woman and a hot meal. And the others, the others who seem to see in your eyes the same desperation you see in theirs, they laugh right along despite the tightness in their chests.

The third thing is that dryads thirst for human blood. Take off your gloves and rub your knuckles against the bark and the dryad will shudder in delight. This is the easiest way to tell but also the most dangerous, and should only be used as a final confirmation after you have strong suspicions and have checked for the other signs. Dryads can, if pressed, uproot and move, attack when threatened. You must be careful.

True spring comes, and then summer and the rest of the jacks. The camp is full and you and Holstegg are allowed to keep your tent. With so many people there’s more danger now and your voices are not so loud when you speak, and there is fear hiding in the lilts of your laughter. Still, it is better than the city, better than anything you have known. Does it matter that it seems more fragile than a poplar, likely to fall over from a strong wind or bounding deer? Does it matter that autumn looms and beyond that winter and a return to everyone you want to escape?

A dryad heart will fetch three hundred dollars if you sell it to the right shops in Milwaukee. The wood from its body will bring in another fifty dollars a yard. It never rots so you can bury it to avoid the lumber boss’ watchful eye, can return right after the season ends, right before the cold freezes it in the ground. Dryad tears can be jarred and are worth nearly a hundred dollars a quart. If you’re busy enough you can make enough in a single year to live off for the rest of your life.

You have a dream. You and Holstegg buy a farm and live there and nothing bad ever happens. No neighbors means no fires in the night. No scrawling messages on the sides of buildings. No sermons aimed at your hearts. You just need enough money for the land and the necessities. You just need a little help...

You stand with your bloody knuckles against the bark, listening to the soft moan of the wood beneath. The axe almost feels light in your opposite hand. You lean forward so your lips are nearly brushing where its mouth is hidden, where every so often a gust of warm air washes over your face.

“Come away with me,” you say, and you whisper your dream, of a small home ringed by tall shadows. Not safe but safer. Not perfect but beautiful. And the rest of the camp will wake one morning to find you gone, and Holstegg too, and upturned earth where certain trees once stood.

Charles Payseur is an avid reader, writer, and reviewer of speculative fiction. His works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others, and many are included in his debut collection, The Burning Day and Other Strange Stories (Lethe Press 2021). He is the series editor of We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction (Neon Hemlock Press) and a multiple-time Hugo and Ignyte Award finalist for his work at Quick Sip Reviews. When not drunkenly discussing Goosebumps, X-Men comic books, and his cats on his Patreon (/quicksipreviews) and Twitter (@ClowderofTwo), he can probably be found raising a beer with his husband, Matt, in their home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Content Notes

Folded Into Tendril and Leaf

Bogi Takács

ILIAR

We were out in the backwaters in our teacher’s rowboat when my beloved told me her true name.

I was rowing at a leisurely pace, enjoying the calm weather rustling my short tunic, the quiet breeze tracing glyphs on my skin. Plants covered the water in large patches, their leaves angular with sawtooth edges. My beloved reached into the stream, her fingers set against the current, and plucked out a hard, prickly seed. She showed it to me — it was grayish-brown, with multiple horn-like peaks, about the size of a large nut if more irregularly shaped.

“Careful, it’s sharp.” She pointed at the tips of the peaks.

Then she flicked her hand and tossed the seed into my lap. I didn’t scramble to catch it — I’d always had slower reflexes than her. I poked at the seed cautiously. Its shape reminded me of an ox, ready to gore.

“My name,” she said, and from her tone of voice I knew that this would be her true name, given only to the closest of the close: to lovers, friends, and family. “Sulyom,” she said, “the seed of the water caltrop in Angwari.” Then, abruptly, with the kind of segue characteristic of her: “In Hlautara, there’s no name for the seed, is there? It’s just called a seed, or maybe even a fruit, and the plant is called something like a water nut. In Angwari, it’s the same word as the iron caltrops you’d throw in front of the enemy’s horses in wartime.”

“Ah. Battle spikes.” I nodded, feeling painfully monolingual. I wanted to learn Angwari, if only to share a secret language with my beloved; would that be an unsuitable motivation? But we were scrambling to finish our studies with Teacher Mirta, and she barely left us any time to ourselves. Teacher Mirta’s approach to magic was purely geometric, an interplay of forces and barriers, with no chants or even words. It was fascinating and unique, entirely unlike anything we could learn at the state academies, but we struggled to keep up.

Sulyom fished out another caltrop and tossed it into my lap. I watched the muscles move under her skin as her thick arm whipped back and forth. “Back in Angwarya, we made flour from them. It’s great in difficult times, when you can’t get much else.” She nodded at the expanses of caltrop plants covering the water further out, their leaves forming a pattern that only resolved from close up, merged into a blanket of green from a distance. “There’s always plenty to go around.”

I stopped rowing and secured the oars. I ran my fingers along the seeds in my lap, careful not to prick myself. “I’m sure people could use it all up if they put their minds to it.”

“Iliar, don’t be so defeatist,” Sulyom said. I hadn’t told her my true name — she simply blurted it out. Now we both knew each other’s true names. With magic, sometimes details like that bled through, unplanned, between people who were close. And we were inseparable.

Until the war, that is; but at that point, the war was nothing but a faint murmur in the halls of power, little more than drafts of plans to move units to the border regions.

* * *

SULYOM

I stopped cutting my hair to show my grief. Iliar had been taken from me to the front lines, so long ago. Would she ever return? 

My hair frustrated me. I wanted to rip it all out. Before, I’d shave it off every once in a while. Kept it short the rest of the time, too. But then I thought — if Iliar returns somehow, she will be able to see my curls. I wanted to show her this, a part of me she had yet to know. My blonde curls were so different from her glossy black hair, which fell almost straight down.

The army took her and left me here with Teacher Mirta. She insisted that she needed at least one student with her, to draw water from the well, to feed the animals. She could draw water from the well and feed the animals just fine. I knew she wanted to keep me because I was the angry one. If soldiers of one army or another showed up, I would fight them. I would fight them and I would win. Or at least hold them back long enough for us to make a run for it.

Yet I was in the hinterlands and Iliar was serving in the healer corps, probably seeing action more days than not. The world was unfair, and I didn’t know how I could fight the entire world all at once.

I’d wanted to go with Iliar, but Teacher Mirta had held me back. I pushed the anger down inside me. All I did these days was push my anger down. All I did. Push it down and get to work. There was plenty of work still. 

The front lines were far, and my training went on uninterrupted. It was only my thoughts that drifted, always. Even now, my hands shook and I dropped the glass tray. Teacher Mirta’s family heirloom, filled with cups of herbal tinctures, her work in progress. I scrambled to pick up the pieces. I cut myself and the concentrated tinctures scalded my hands. I gritted my teeth. I was bleeding onto my teacher’s keepsake rug. My stomach spasmed. How much worse could I make this?

Teacher Mirta found me standing above the ruin of her labors, blood dripping from both of my hands, one palm involuntarily closing over the shards I’d gathered. I expected punishment — she wasn’t cruel, but she was cold. I took a step back, almost losing my balance.

She looked me over. I noticed she’d paled. She was very light-skinned, from the northern mountains, but now she seemed even lighter, as if the blood flowing out from me had flown out of her, too. Even her hair seemed, all of a sudden, brittle as glass. 

“I will not punish you,” she said evenly. “I will teach you something else. You need to learn the lesson of stillness and calm. Even when your soul aches, you must know when to remain still, and how to hold still, for as long as it takes.” She gazed into my eyes. I averted my head — a clumsy attempt at hiding my turmoil. “You will spend a fortnight as a plant — a plant of your choice. This will be your lesson.” She paused.

I considered it. She’d mentioned this exercise before. I missed Iliar so much I could claw off my skin, but there was no way of getting her back. We weren’t in any immediate danger ourselves. I might as well learn something in the meanwhile. I nodded.

“Most of my previous students who needed this exercise chose a tree.” Teacher Mirta paused again. “The ritual involves swallowing the plant’s seed.”

She did not know my true name. But I would reveal it to her, just for this.

Pain came easy to me.

* * *

ILIAR

When I saw the stray guinea pig running to hide under a rotting pile of wood, I knew all was lost. Teacher Mirta had always kept the guinea pigs in a large shed, carefully under lock and key.

To find my way back to Teacher Mirta’s house, to my beloved Sulyom, I had wandered through a landscape of lack and deprivation; what the war had not destroyed, the marauding armies had taken for food. Most of the guinea pigs had probably warmed errant soldiers’ stomachs.

The closest household was Aunt Karisa’s. When she heard me approach, she came to the fence and leaned against it, her body trembling. “I saw the soldiers,” she muttered. “They came for the mage and took her. Poor Mirta,” she said in such a tone as to brook no confusion about the fate of my teacher.

My body was beginning to take on Aunt Karisa’s trembling in sympathetic resonance. “What happened to her student?” I asked.

“Oh, that youngster? About your age? A boy or a girl? I could never figure it out.”

“A girl,” I told her as firmly as I could manage. Sulyom was somewhere in between, but her body was her own business, not a village auntie’s — and she’d always considered herself a girl, grew up as a girl, lived as a girl.

“All right then,” she grumbled, “no need to take offense. My eyes are not what they used to be.”

I wanted to shake her; some of Sulyom’s vehemence that had rubbed off on me. “Yes, but — where is she?”

She shook her head, her blue-printed headscarf slipping. “I don’t know. I hadn’t seen her in weeks when the soldiers came. I was wondering where she’d gone... Some of the youngsters from the village ran away to join the army, so I figured...” She shook her head again, then brushed a thin brown strand of hair that’d escaped from under the scarf behind her ear with unsteady fingers. “That’s all I know, my dear.”

I’d held myself together through all the battles, through the assault on the ramparts of Samur, but now I struggled not to drop to my knees. I’d come all this way for Sulyom, my boots turning to rags, walked across endless lands for Sulyom — all for nothing?

* * *

SULYOM

Teacher Mirta would make me swallow the caltrop, I knew. I craved it. I craved it like I craved the pain that stabbed at me every time I moved my fingers. I wanted to turn against the whole world. I could not, so I turned against myself. The pain could take the possibility of thought away.

Teacher Mirta cleaned and treated my wounds and chemical burns, and bandaged everything carefully. She applied gentle wisps of magic, belying her hard nature.

“I can’t heal your hands faster,” she said, turning her small pale head to the side like a bird. “Your body struggles against it. You’ll have to wait until after your shapechange.”

I’d wanted to run away. This was the next best thing.

I dreamt about the ritual the night before the date we had set. The caltrop going down my throat. It felt as if it were one of the iron caltrops laid out to delay marching armies. A weapon. It tore up my mouth, my throat, and I could feel it slicing through my innards. I was splitting open, with a nonsensically large wound in keeping with the logic of the dream. I reached into it and turned myself inside out. My damaged hands grabbed my damaged flesh and twisted, until what had been inside was on the outside, and what had been hidden inside me all along was a shining gleaming crystal, glowing with sunlight —

I woke with a startle. My chest hurt. Teacher Mirta was sitting at the foot of my bed.

“I had some seeds saved from last year. I made them into a powder,” she said. Then, quietly: “Not everything needs to be violent, you know.”

I knew. I’d come all the way from Angwarya to study with someone who wasn’t part of the great academies. Those mages with their elaborate ranks, their willingness to go to war, their saber-rattling — it disgusted me and I feared it. Teacher Mirta lived out here to avoid people, but also to avoid fighting.

I didn’t want to fight because I knew I would be good at it.

* * *

ILIAR

I wandered around the back — the hothouses all destroyed, the plantings ripped out or eaten by wild animals once the protective enchantments had faded. I couldn’t feel anyone’s presence, only an odd vibration; maybe the aftershocks of a fight? Sulyom would have fought if she’d been taken by force, of that I was certain.

I tried to expand my senses. Everything ought to have been clear, now that the battles had subsided, but I still couldn’t get an impression of either Sulyom or Teacher Mirta. I would have felt their passing through our bonds, death reverberated stronger and farther than almost anything; so they had to be alive. But I knew little beyond that, and I suspected not only because Mirta had warded herself well from our stray thoughts. Where were they? What had happened? Our neighbor had insisted that Sulyom had vanished long before Teacher Mirta was taken. Where could she have gone? Would she have left of her own accord? I hoped desperately that she hadn’t run away to find me while I was already on my way back.

In Sanabrou, there was a prison for mages, I knew, warded so tight that not the faintest impression of magic could escape. If Teacher Mirta had been taken there, that would explain why I could not find a trace of her. But what of Sulyom? Some imprint of her lingered still, even if it slipped further away from my attention the more I tried to focus on it. Yet I could not find where she had gone — it was as if she had vanished, dissolved in the heavy late-summer air.

I walked through Teacher Mirta’s small domain. The lake beyond the plant beds was entirely overgrown with water caltrops. It was little more than a pond, really — not even an oxbow lake, maybe a remainder of one. Here, on the edge of the wetlands, it was hard to tell how everything had formed.

Yet I was sure the caltrops had not been there when I had left; they could be found all over the backwaters, but not in our teacher’s own backyard. Despite all Teacher Mirta’s misgivings about symbolism and words, I still felt a tinge of inspiration. I could make use of a caltrop to lead me to Sulyom. I had certainly acquired more skill with location spells while I’d been running from one battle to another, desperately searching for wounded people to heal. It wasn’t the abstract interplay of forces Teacher Mirta had taught me — the battle-learned magic had a solidity to it, symbols like little chunks of power. A sulyom could take me to Sulyom. Even if not instantaneously, I didn’t have enough raw power for that; but I could always just walk, once I had an idea where to go.

I took off my trousers, but put my boots back on — stepping onto a caltrop with bare feet would be most unwelcome. I pulled the hem of my tunic between my legs and tied it to my belt. I wobbled closer to the lake, unsteady on uneven ground. I waded into the water —

An odd pressure, then a sharp pain. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, then I swore. The sole of my right boot had split open, the water and the walking and the odd caltrop embedded in the muck altogether proving too much for it.

I hopped backwards on one leg, lost my balance, and slipped, falling with a loud splosh. Another caltrop wedged itself in my cheek. I grimaced, grabbed it and shoved it into the side pouch clipped to my belt, but one of its tips broke off and lodged in the flesh of my palm.

This, at least, was one trial I could overcome. I stood, favoring my left leg, and closed my eyes to better direct my magic. There was an odd moment of hesitation, as if the universe itself was holding its breath. Then the fragment popped out, and the skin pulled together with that uneasy and all-too-familiar sensation of flesh moving as if under its own will.

I opened my eyes and walked back to the grass where I could sit, hoping nothing would sting or bite me. I could heal my foot, but I’d need to find a new pair of boots — inanimate objects were much harder for me to fix. At least I’d had enough presence of mind to preserve a caltrop.

The two healings were small but finicky, and left me hungry and lightheaded. I’d left my backpack in the remains of my former room. I wondered if I should go back inside. Someone had ransacked the house while I was out on the front lines — had they been looking for something valuable, or just some dried fruit and meat stashed away somewhere? I hadn’t left much for people to find, and even the supplies in my backpack were beginning to dwindle.

I couldn’t take the time to eat. I had to know. I took the caltrop out of my pouch, held it delicately between three fingers, and focused on the sensation at my fingertips; the hardness and potential for violence coiled within the seed. Closed my eyes again, tracing lines of influence and belonging.

My eyes popped open of their own accord. The trail led nowhere. It was as if Sulyom were right there, standing in front of me. What was I doing wrong?

I threw the caltrop back into the lake, my eyes smarting with sudden tears.

* * *

SULYOM

This, then, was the punishment: I couldn’t remember the change. The change I’d craved. The chance to get out of my flesh. Just one faint memory of Teacher Mirta peeling apart the muscles of my limbs, thread by thread. Nothing else was left.

Just the water, just my width and breadth, weighing down and floating. Held up.

I wasn’t motionless; I wasn’t paralyzed. But movement was slow. Sensation was slow. Thinking was slow. Above me was sunlight on air, below me water, my bulk separating it from the sun. Fish scurried out from underneath me, escaping the lack of brightness and oxygen.

One day I thought: Trees can support humanlike thought much better, Teacher Mirta had said.

Another day I thought: I should have chosen a tree.

Another day: Then again, we both enjoy a challenge, she had said, faintly amused.

Another day: How much time yet to a fortnight?

Then I didn’t think about time anymore. It was hard to produce thought. I didn’t force it. I grew, expanded. I would grow seed. Cover the pond, the struggling fish; I hadn’t considered the fish, but it wasn’t as if I could expand any slower. There was only the pattern of sunlight on leaves, rain and darkness on leaves, my weight held up by the water. Roots were hard to figure out, but I knew from what remained of my human memories that my leafy rosettes would eventually detach from the roots remaining in the soil, and I would swim on the surface. It felt strange now. But it wouldn’t happen in a fortnight.

I gradually eased into the days and into my new existence. The pain not so acute, the pain in the soul. The lesson, being learned, deep in the body.

* * *

ILIAR

I shook out the bedspread, then fell on top of it. I had to find Sulyom, but first, I had to get some rest, and the next day I could rethink my approach. The war had taught me how to fall asleep anytime, anyplace.

I woke from a dreamless night with a shock, as if something had pricked me. I searched around, patted down my bed. Something dropped to the floor. The water caltrop I’d picked from the lake? Hadn’t I thrown it back into the water?

I gasped, suddenly reminded of the changing ritual Teacher Mirta had always brought up whenever one of us apprentices had grown sloppy and unguarded in our haste, our eagerness to learn. I will turn you into a tree yet. I learned much from my time as a tree at your age. We joked behind her back that it’d turned her heartless, and we were sure she’d heard, but she never showed any sign that she did. She was such a grouch, but she wasn’t mean-spirited.

Yet Sulyom had not been turned into a tree: a blanket of water caltrops, rather. 

All the stray magical impressions I’d discarded earlier fit into place. This made sense, the kind of symbolic sense I’d learned to handle after I’d left here. I’d only ever felt lonely, out of my depth; but maybe I’d acquired some independence, too.

After the wave of relief, a sudden fear took my breath — the change so sharp that I almost choked on the air.

The water caltrop was an annual plant, not a perennial. And the season was ending.

* * *

SULYOM

Large animals arrived. People arrived. I couldn’t distinguish between the two with my new senses, and my human magic was somewhere out of reach. All my anger was someplace else. My fast snappy thoughts, someplace else. The torrent of magic at my control, someplace else.

I didn’t understand speech. I couldn’t follow rapid movements. My teacher thought desperately at me, but I couldn’t understand her words, or even her intentions. It all happened too fast.

The plants in the beds exuded warning chemicals that should have helped me prepare, but couldn’t. I understood the signal, but I wasn’t able to escape, and neither were they. The hothouses were broken open, the plants within becoming accessible to my plant-senses — then destroyed in rapid succession. Decay floated in the air, spoiling even the sunlight.

Were these enemy soldiers? What were they hoping to find?

I was helpless with no access to my one talent, the one that had ensured I would be left here: to fight, to defend the one person who had made me helpless and unable to protect her.

I spent days piecing together my impressions, thought forced through my stems like sap, and finally I understood. These hadn’t been enemy soldiers. They couldn’t have reached us so fast. These soldiers had been of this country. Soldiers of Hlautar. And my teacher had trusted them.

* * *

ILIAR

I had to turn Sulyom back into her human shape. I knew nothing about spells of change, but I knew about healing: you couldn’t make a wound close while holding it open. I knew about general principles before coming here, then from Teacher Mirta I had learned about processes, and finally in the war, I had learned about symbols. I could cobble something together.

I gathered a bundle of objects that looked at least somewhat valuable — a carving of northern animals, a spice-holder, a knife with a bone handle — and gave them to Aunt Karisa to trade for a pair of sturdy boots, the ones the fisherfolk used. While she was making her usual weekly journey to the market, I tied back my hair and set to encircle the small lake with rope. It would have a dual use: both magical and practical. I found a set of pegs in one of the storage-rooms, but no hammer — it was a struggle to find purchase in the soil, just far enough from the water that the ground was less slippery, but not as far as to use up too much rope.

I had an idea, but I wasn’t sure I could carry it out. Once the lopsided circle was complete, I needed to get some of the rope over the water, to draw out chords as long as I could make. I tried tying one end of the rope to a stone and throwing, but my attempts didn’t even make it halfway across. I wished I had a crossbow. I’d need to swim again just to get the rope exactly where I wanted it. I imagined a giant star shape.

Once I had my boots, I waded. I thought about putting on heavy clothing to protect myself, but I was worried about drowning, even in shallow water. Yet this time around, it was as if the angry, biting seeds had swum out of my way. I could feel that my theory was correct — and I could feel Sulyom gathering her mind together from each tiny leaf floating on the surface, slowly coming together in an attempt to aid me. How could I have missed it the first time?

This time I knew what I was doing, and I would not give up. I would get her back.

I finally had more of the rope across the lake, forming a star. I began to gather the plants in the center. Teacher Mirta would have disapproved of such crude symbolism, but in war there was little time for abstract elegance. A star shape focused energy well, bringing a hundred suns to mind; it would do.

The water caltrop had initially been rooted in the wet soil, but as the season passed, at least some of the plants detached and floated, and the remaining roots were light and fragile. Yet the masses of plants were heavy, unwieldy, and I could not quite figure out how to use my magic to aid this process. I slogged, wet to the bone, occasionally wracked by sobs, but I routed all my terror my helplessness my sense of incompetence back into my magic; just like my love, my terrified shaking fear of losing the one I loved after I’d walked across a continent and found her.

The fear subsided as I worked, turned into a whole-body thrumming that kept me warm and allowed me to focus on Sulyom: her shape, her askew apologetic smile that I loved, her hair she liked to shave to the scalp and always promised to grow out but never did, her broad wide shoulders, her jaw that made people think she was a boy, her short thick arms and legs, everything everything, the hair on the smooth curve of her belly, the roundness and angles, the beauty, the beauty, my own crushing need.

A body, slowly coalescing, my fingers scrambling to tie limbs together lest they fray again, lest they disintegrate.

* * *

SULYOM

There was a sense of being gathered, pulled this way and that. Perturbing, yet familiar. A large animal: a person. A person I knew was yanking me around, piling leaf upon leaf, until I was blocking the sunlight from myself.

It was purposeful, like the warnings of dying plants in the hothouse. It was important. I strained to pull myself together, body and mind.

My shape: limbs forming. Stems tied together, unnatural yet remembered. I had been like this before. Once.

Iliar brought me back, but I couldn’t speak. My body felt soggy and ponderous once out of the water. My mouth couldn’t make the right motions. I was beginning to turn human, but my body didn’t know what to circulate. What was blood? I was losing my green. 

I coughed, all of a sudden desperate for air.

* * *

ILIAR

Her body was heavy, and I had to overstrain my magic to convince it to keep asserting its shape. The water was too tempting; returning into plantness was too tempting. I dragged us out — Sulyom couldn’t quite walk but could put a leg forward, then another, and I pushed, shoved, pulled. Coughs wracked her, and I feared she would fall apart.

She sat by the water in the blanket I’d wrapped around her, gazing at the lake, breathing very slowly and existing very slowly, and I knew that some of her was still plant.

I could try to adjust her nervous system — I’d treated so many soldiers with head injuries, back injuries, neck injuries. Usually, all I could do was help the body heal itself. You couldn’t restore an original state. In those days I’d reminded myself of my teacher’s words: change was how the mind worked. The outcome was always different. You never stepped into the same waters twice.

I would wait it out.

* * *

SULYOM

Why had Teacher Mirta trusted the soldiers? Had she? What had happened? Now that I was back on dry land, on my two feet, all my anger came flooding back. My lesson had not gone as planned. Had I learned anything? 

She was always an advocate of peace. Had she sabotaged her own defense? I hadn’t thought we’d be attacked, either. I was naive. But she was so much more experienced! I didn’t even have words for my helpless fury. 

I had to find her, I had to ask her why.

I couldn’t feel her magic. But I could feel her, plant to plant to plant.

* * *

ILIAR

“The anger helps,” Sulyom finally said, with pauses between each word — not a waiting, but a hesitation. She bit her lip, her fingers scrabbling in the mud. I felt her words like caltrops, sharp and uncomfortable to hold. “I like being plant. I also like being human. I need to be...” she stopped for so long I thought she wouldn’t finish the sentence. “Both. I must.”

“I’m here,” I said, and stopped myself from asking, How can I help? Sulyom wouldn’t know — and who could? People didn’t stay plants for many months on end, struggling to find their way back. The exercise was never supposed to last this long. “I’ll try to help as best as I can,” I finally said.

I also stopped myself from saying, Why do you need to be both? I knew one could never return to a previous state entirely. The mind grew, like a plant — and this was good. Attempts at fixing people never came out right, and attempts at fixing people’s minds even more so. I’ve seen this enough in my healing work.

But there was something here I still didn’t understand, some kind of help I could offer if only I could figure out what Sulyom needed.

“Please ask,” she said. “Ask.”

What should I ask? She needed to be both — why, beyond the fact that she was already both and there was no reverting that?

“Where is Teacher Mirta?” I asked, and Sulyom sagged; some kind of tension I hadn’t even noticed was suddenly leaving her body. Was this the right question?

“I sense her,” she said. “Through plants.”

* * *

SULYOM

Iliar came back for me. Iliar fought for me. Iliar was fighting for me. I turned the thought around in myself, in memories and sense-impressions. It gave me myself.

I had to explain it to her somehow.

Our teacher was imprisoned, and I could feel the magical wards around her basement cell. Nothing could get in and out. Yet I could perceive her. The cell had a narrow, barred window for human sense-impressions. For sunlight. Next to the window grew the roots of a majestic linden tree, some clumps of grass. I could not sense Teacher Mirta seeing the linden tree. Her mind was blocked by the wards. But the linden tree was sensing her. With plant-sight, plant-awareness. Some of it was chemical, I knew. Some maybe magical? I wasn’t sure. But it wasn’t human magic, animal magic. It hadn’t been warded against.

The linden tree could sense her, and the ash tree on the corner could sense the linden tree, and the brush whose name was unknown to me could sense the ash tree, and so on all the way to me.

It was a slow but systematic propagation. Like seed or pollen. Like water seeping into roots. A substance permeating a membrane, then another. When I reached out through the trees, I wasn’t sure if I was aware of the now, the near-past, or the long-gone. Teacher Mirta was gaunt in the darkness of her cell, even thinner than usual. A smaller animal instead of a large animal, but with something odd to her. Something plantlike. From her time spent as a tree? Was she still tree, in some way? Like the plants in the hothouse, she was experiencing distress.

I grabbed a stick and began to draw diagrams in the mud. Iliar was very close. She wasn’t plant, not even a little. Yet somehow that was all right.

* * *

ILIAR

Sulyom was drawing with great determination, jabbing the stick into the soggy dirt; yet for all her effort, I couldn’t understand. She drew a spiderweb-shape, then something akin to little frog-hops. She was close to tears as each of my guesses missed the mark.

I finally put a hand on top of the shape she had scratched into the earth, turned her head toward me, and looked into her eyes. I didn’t need to cast a spell for this — our closeness would make the magic carry, organize itself into abstract processes even Teacher Mirta could appreciate. I nodded, and Sulyom nodded back.

I couldn’t assimilate the plantness inside her, within her — my mind would just slide over it. But she focused on human-images, human-senses, converting her impressions into something I could understand, even if with difficulty. She could sense Teacher Mirta through a vast network of plants, the older trees its hubs with an infinite number of spokes connecting them. The network ended in a few clumps of grass across from a basement grating, by the roots of a linden tree. The longer I waited, the more detail I saw. Surely a tree could not sense in such visual detail; this had to be some form of extrapolation by Sulyom’s mind, or was it? Teacher Mirta stared at each blade of grass with unspeakable longing written on her face, but her thoughts were well-shielded behind the wards, invisible to plant-life.

I contemplated this, the plantness slowing me down. I couldn’t reach Teacher Mirta magically. Yet I could reach the linden tree outside the building, and I could use that for a location spell. I didn’t have enough raw power to move to the target of my spell, but Sulyom could help with that. The two of us could put this together. We used to work well together — and for a moment fear twinged in me: that was before. Before the war, before our paths diverged and Sulyom turned into a giant mat of water caltrops and I learned all the magic of word-chunks, symbol-chunks that hadn’t quite meshed with our previous approach. Yet we were still the same people, and still (I squeezed her hand) in love.

* * *

SULYOM

This was something I could do. This was something I would do, and right away—

Iliar grabbed my arm. “Don’t rush into it, we’re doing this together.”

I grinned at her. “Together means... with me. I’m rushing into it. It’s my way. I need answers: what went wrong. What happened.”

She chuckled. “I thought you were supposed to learn patience from your time as a plant.”

“I was very patient. All the impatience gathered up in me and now it’s free.” I made a bursting motion with my hands. Swim, swim little caltrops!

She laughed again and we hugged, for the span of a long breath. Then we rolled sideways, folded into tendril and leaf.

The location spell,

                                                the plant-senses,

the translocation spell,

                                                the raw power

hers

                                                and mine

it all fit together like the teeth of two combs. Like the fingers on two hands intertwined.

My words, her sentences.

We toppled out into an interior courtyard, our backs to a linden tree.

“Hush, there are guards,” Iliar whispered. I reached out — through the plants, but also at the same time with my human magic, and the two overlapped —

a structure rising up that encompassed both.

I improvised. Nothing could have foretold this moment. Structure beyond structure.

The prison cell was warded to prevent anything from leaving, not to prevent anything from entering. For that, there were the guards, courtyards within courtyards, iron gates. No one was supposed to get this close.

I grabbed Iliar by the hand and turned. We rolled into the cell, passing through wall and ground and anything else in the way.

* * *

ILIAR

I turned around, disoriented. Teacher Mirta was sitting on a grimy cot in one corner, her back straight. Across from her, dust floating in the air glinted in the light of the narrow, barred window-slit by the ceiling.

“Well, you’re in. Now how do you propose to get out?” Teacher Mirta’s words were bone-dry, but there was something unexpected in her facial expression, the way her eyebrows rose. Some kind of warmth, perhaps?

“I didn’t plan,” Sulyom shook her head. “That far.”

“I can see that.”

Sulyom grimaced. “I’ll fight my way out. But Teacher, what happened?”

The two of them glared at each other.

“You could, in principle, fight your way out,” Teacher Mirta said. “But it would worsen my political position even further.”

“My question! What happened!?” Sulyom was yelling. I winced, took a step back, and bumped into the rough-hewn wall.

“Patience finally ran out,” Teacher Mirta said, unfazed. “Allegations were made.”

I also felt an urge to yell at her: could she stop with the passive voice? But it would hardly be seemly to shout at my teacher. I didn’t understand what was happening. “What kinds of allegations?”

“Several kinds of treason... sabotage... I believe even espionage, though at some point, I must confess I lost track.” Her voice sounded more bitter now than dry.

What was going on? Surely these allegations were false; I knew my teacher well enough to know that she owed allegiance to no one besides herself. “Espionage? Sabotage?” I echoed the words, confounded.

“‘Holding back resources from the war effort’ was how they phrased it,” Teacher Mirta responded. “Hiding your fellow student.”

“Did you?” Sulyom demanded. The air was becoming thick with magic, as if with humidity.

Teacher Mirta looked away. “Not on purpose. I was expecting my connections from back in the day to serve me for a while yet. I wasn’t anticipating soldiers on my doorstep.” She took a shaky breath. “I only found out here in prison that Governor Atzin had resigned.”

Sulyom hissed in surprise, but I felt ashamed. What did this mean? I had always told myself I was focusing on my studies, that was why I couldn’t pay attention to politics. But politics had spattered me in blood and left people dying in my arms. I had been worrying whether Sulyom could understand speech enough to make sense of Teacher Mirta’s convoluted sentences, but I couldn’t make sense of anything, while Sulyom was busy nodding. She wasn’t even from here...?

I realized with a startle that that was exactly the reason. Sulyom understood because she had to — because for a long while, even before the war, her existence turned on knowing the political context, and adjusting her plans accordingly. She’d never had the luxury of not paying attention.

* * *

SULYOM

I knew it would come to this. Teacher Mirta had never joined the mage guilds. The associations. The organizations for the war effort. In peacetime it was tolerated, being the odd one out. Like me. In war? I already found out.

She had relinquished a student but kept another. Kept me. Saved me from having to kill. She’d known that Iliar the healer would make it through. Sent Iliar to keep me, but then they came and took her away. For who knows what they claimed she plotted. I had to struggle to understand her words, had to reach out with my mind, but this I understood even without her saying anything. Lack of enthusiasm was one thing; holding back resources from the war effort was another.

If the soldiers had managed to find me, if I had not been plant, they might have taken me and left her.

Or they might have taken us both.

My voice rose higher and higher. Would that alert the guards? I couldn’t remain quiet. “Would you still have done it? If you knew the soldiers were coming?”

She glared back. “Yes. Yes, I think I would.”

“You risked my life!” I was trembling. Fear flashed through me that my body might split apart, into stem and leaf.

“You don’t know the alternative!”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. I knew Teacher Mirta had served the crown of Hlautar in her youth. She never told me the details, but I could imagine them. Still, I didn’t have my peace.

I couldn’t leave it unsaid. “You abandoned me!” I screamed at her.

She raised a hand, and all around us the cell shifted, changed. She shouted back at me, in a way I’d never heard her shout: “I was trying to come back!”

* * *

ILIAR

A pattern flashed in the room, just for an instant. Even after it vanished, I could no longer unsee it — it was hidden in every pebble on the floor, every piece of straw, every odd scratch on the forbidding stone walls.

It added up to something that filled the space, a third dimension emerging from two, a fourth emerging from three? My mind hurt.

She cleared her throat and began again, calmer this time. “The gate isn’t finished yet; I still need to add five more layers to the central sphere to amplify my power sufficiently to bypass the wards. But now that the two of you are here...”

Sulyom backed down, and in her face I noticed that childlike wonder I had not seen for so long, that eagerness to know, to learn more about magic that had driven her to Teacher Mirta. The spirit of free thought that the academies had long since discarded, on all sides of the ever-shifting but sharply drawn borders, in favor of a thirst for destruction.

Sulyom reached out with one hand and evoked the gate again, with such sudden grace that the realization struck me: this was what her power was suited for, once her anger found a way to be directed. This and not fighting, this and not killing. She stared into the pattern that I could barely behold with a cursory glance. “I... see,” she muttered.

Teacher Mirta nodded, getting to her feet with some difficulty. “The two of you can assist me. These processes can hold enough power without further amplification already, with three of us.”

Something in the back of my head registered that she said processes and not structures, where I would have certainly called it a structure. But I had come to accept that there were many ways to approach magic.

I reached out to the central sphere that was not a sphere, through the entire incomprehensive setup. Maybe if I could think of what I was doing as a healing, that would make it easier. It didn’t need to be fixed, just allowed to balance itself. I halted, my fingers up against thin air. “Where do we go now?” I asked. If she couldn’t stay in Hlautar, then that had to mean she was going over to the other side, to those who spent their time trying to kill the people I was trying my best to patch up —

“There are more than two sides and there are more than two places.” Teacher Mirta sounded irritated.

Sulyom almost jumped. Anger and fear radiated from her in equal measure. “If you’re thinking of Angwarya, Teacher, the Minister-President is just about to declare —”

Teacher Mirta’s gaze could have flattened a mountain. “I was not thinking of Angwarya. Not every land is embroiled in this conflict yet.”

* * *

SULYOM

Jumping into the unknown was familiar. I’d declined offers from three academies. I’d come all the way from Angwarya to study with Teacher Mirta. I’d met my beloved here. Iliar had walked across the continent to come back to me. Everything carried a risk, and in many places we were unwelcome. I didn’t want to be a resource. I didn’t want to be coerced to fight.

I didn’t mind running, I didn’t mind danger — as long as I was with my beloved.

I didn’t hold my breath through the passage — I stopped doing that when I was plant.

* * *

ILIAR

It was weeks before we got close to water again; weeks before we got to a place where we could begin to settle down, at least temporarily. We found three oxbow lakes surrounded by a forest, a forgotten backwater with no villages nearby; the river that had birthed the lakes now flowed further to the north.

Sulyom waded into the water, laughing, pulling a floating plant with large cabbage-like leaves away from the surface. Droplets gleamed on it in the early morning sunlight. The plant was attached to another identical-looking plant by a green stalk, and that to another, and to another, all floating on the water.

“Water lettuce,” Sulyom yelled in delight. “Teacher Mirta said.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that.” I wobbled closer, my swimsuit a size too large — just like Sulyom’s. We had what we could find. I gestured at the expanse of green. “This one also seems to grow at a frantic pace.”

“You can’t make... what is it? ... flour out of it.” Sulyom let the water lettuce drop back into the water, and closed her eyes. “It doesn’t belong here, but it likes it here. Maybe a bit too much.”

Was this a metaphor? Sulyom was not as given to metaphor and symbol as I was. It was probably an impression through the plant-sense. I chuckled. “Too much indeed. One of these days we’ll even be able to afford a new boat.”

“One of these days, we’ll be able to stop running.” She dove under, resurfacing next to me. I ran a hand through the short, stubbly hair on her head — she’d changed her mind about growing it out yet again. I liked the curls, but I also liked this particular sensation. 

Sulyom giggled, her voice rising and dropping. I hugged her and she hugged me back, tilted with me back into the water with a loud splash. I got water into my nose and sputtered, but then it was my turn to dive at her, for us to fall back together again. Her closeness also gave me an impression of her magic, and the field of water lettuce beyond started to glow — not with an emerald sheen, but with something invisible to the eye. Threads connected, reached all the way to the horizon. I stopped moving and just floated, soaking in the impression.

Sulyom floated next to me. “I give you this,” she said. “Give me something.”

What could I give? I opened my mind, seeing symbol interlinked with symbol, our migration and the migration of the water lettuce, our togetherness like two halves of a whole, and even further — because magic didn’t only consist of Sulyom’s magic and my magic, but many other different kinds besides. Even Teacher Mirta’s unfathomable vectors and gradients fit into a united, yet manifold whole.

I shivered, the vision vanishing. “Wait a moment, where is she? She was supposed to be back from town by now.” The glow of connection — could it have been...?

Sulyom prodded the water lettuce and chuckled. “Someone’s experimenting with new shapes,” she said.

I stared for a long moment. “I... hope I won’t have to change her back, too.” At least the water lettuce seemed sturdier than the caltrops.

“She has it worked out.” Sulyom paused. “I guess.”

“That’s one way to hide, certainly...” Would the wars ever end? Would we ever be able to stop running?

I knitted my fingers together with Sulyom’s, and watched as the floating mat moved slightly, shuddered as if from the wind, the large upright leaves waving stronger and stronger until I had to avert my gaze from the sight — the intensity of it all, the complexity of it all.

I could learn this. We could learn this together. I looked up to the sky — deep inside myself, I could feel the seed of a new promise take root, begin to grow.

Bogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish author, critic, and scholar who’s an immigrant to the United States. Bogi has won the Lambda and Hugo awards, and has been a finalist for other awards. Eir debut poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting and eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation were both released in 2019. You can find Bogi talking about books at bogireadstheworld.com, and on various social media like Twitter, Patreon, and Instagram as bogiperson.

Content Notes

Feeding Coals

Mile H.

One day, you run away from the sun and into the rain. Maybe this is in the past, maybe the future, or maybe never, but it happens to most of us. This story wants you to know that it can end well.

* * *

One day, you find yourself beneath the awning of a narrow house. 

When you peer through the window in the door, using your own shadow to see inside, you find plants lined up the walls of the entryway, a path through barely visible. You can see the doorway to what looks like a library, with long shelves bowing under piles of books. On the opposite end of that room, a staircase leads up. There’s someone inside, slowly descending the stairs one at a time. 

You don’t know him, but you met his eyes earlier from across the street. You were standing on the pavement, feeling the rain fall on your face, and he was on the roof of this building, looking at you. It was cold and your leg ached from walking. You came to the porch to hide from the rain. 

You don’t think you knocked, but he opens the door as if he’s been expecting you. 

“Welcome, welcome,” he says as he steps back to let you in. “Come, drink some tea with me.” 

He’s an older, fat man dressed in what looks like night blue silk pyjamas. You don’t know this yet, but you haven’t disturbed his rest; this is just the way he always dresses. 

Even if you don’t usually drink tea, you find yourself in the library, sitting across from him on the edge of a gold-trimmed, plush chair. You don’t pay attention to the taste of the tea, just to the blessed silence of the place. Before you know it, your hands cradle a drained cup, still warm. At the bottom, clumps of wet leaves draw a map of your story. 

You can almost read it, which should worry you. The person two steps in front of you definitely can. He’s not smiling. 

“Do you need a place to stay?” he asks. 

You would like to answer, but you can’t. 

He gives you a key to a room on the second floor and gives you a tour of the place, without asking for your name nor your story. (This is fortunate, as you haven’t settled on either one yet.) His room is at the opposite end of the corridor, with a shared bathroom in the middle. The main staircase continues upward, opening out onto a landscaped roof. There’s a patio, a sitting area, and the greenhouse you saw from the street. It is bigger than it looked from below, taking up most of the terrace’s space. Through the transparent walls, you can see it is filled with tall, lush plants.

The man isn’t surprised by your arrival, and isn’t quite a man. See, there are many people like this one. In every city, every forest, every ruffle of sand. How they got there is their story to tell. How you got to them is your own story, and I hope you will tell us someday. 

For now, here is this strange man’s story.

He lives in this building, in a neighbourhood you’ve heard of but never visited. If you want to know exactly where, please look up on your next walk outside. There, at the top of an ordinary building in an undistinguished part of town, you might see it at sunset: a glittering solarium overflowing with green all year round, and someone willing to accept you as you are. It might not be this man, but it’ll be someone like him. Your brain might see a man, or a woman, or someone else. For this story, he chose to be a man. 

Once you decide that you want him to mean something in your story, he will watch you back. What else could he do? If you saw yourself, you’d stare back, too. 

This person used to be spiteful of humanity, but hatred is as exhausting as it is contagious. He grew tired of it, like so many things. So did you.

He comes from the countryside, he tells you into one silence, as you stare at another empty cup; a different one, with nothing at the bottom, yet. 

His family lived in a thicket behind a shrine and fed off prayers and morning fog. The shrine fell into disuse, and he moved here to escape the deforestation.

In a town, with its ever-changing days and nights, there is no need to wait or hunt. Quick and expensive solutions grow like mushrooms before needs can fully germinate. Things get fixed regardless of whether they are broken, and what’s left over gets discarded. You used to think it was better this way, until you realised you had distress in you that couldn’t be cured by products and longings that couldn’t be patched up like potholes.

The man will tell you many different stories as the days pass, and you will invent even more. You like this one. 

Most days, you stay in your room and lie down. It became your space when you weren’t looking: it has your comb, your backpack, your unplugged cellphone. How long have you been here? How long has he? 

Does it matter? Do you?

* * *

You sleep too much and not enough. When you are awake at dawn, you like to go up to the roof and watch the stars dissipate like mist. The man often steps out around that time and sweeps his mug across the rising sun, to drink with satisfaction the last few sleepy shades of the congealing night smog. 

One day, you join his side, and he offers you some. It is thick and smoky on your tongue. 

Pedestrians hurry to and fro beneath the edge of the roof, splashing you with fragmented phone calls as you drink: half-heard arguments and greetings in bite-size servings. You largely prefer to observe the spectacle than to take part in it. 

* * *

Nearly every day, you find yourself alone in the greenhouse. Well, except for the dozens of plants. Their large strange leaves cast dancing shadows on the draining mats. You stare at them for hours.

When you go search for your host, sometimes you find him on the roof snacking on cold breezes, sometimes sprawling on the lush library’s couch with his pet turtle. 

You take long walks outside, even when it hurts. Sometimes you bring your luggage with you. The man never mentions it, when you come back. 

There’s always food in the pantry and in the fridge, and he never questions how little or how much you take. “Food is sustenance,” he says once, over pasta. “Not virtue.”

* * *

One day, you find him in the bathroom with the door open. He is reading a book in the dry bathtub, feet up, an expensive bathrobe rounded by his belly. He looks pristine, with barely even his ankles showing; he always wears five layers, like he’s a plant himself with leaves wrapping around his stem.

You have not read that book. It is part of a pile of books you bought to feel better, but never got around to reading. You tell yourself that is why you don’t feel better yet. 

He offers to read you bits aloud. You shake your head and leave him be. You don’t want to be a bother. 

* * *

Another day, you wade into the snow to reach the greenhouse. The city is blanketed by winter’s coat, but inside it is humid and lukewarm. The walls are hoarfrosted with frozen condensation. It feels like being on a different planet. There must still be a world behind the glass. You think you should check to make sure, just like you used to check the time, but you don’t care enough to scratch off the ice. Instead, you stand very close, and spiky swirling lines appear as you exhale. 

You turn around, and realise you aren’t alone. A cat yawns and stretches. It is the first time you’ve seen it move; you assumed it was a decoration. 

It curls up with you on the chaise longue, short fur soft beneath your palm. It melts beautifully amidst pillows in jewel tones. You feel like an unpotted plant, roots dangling. Vulnerable. You hug the cat. 

After that, the cat visits you often in your room. It kneads your pillow and steals your socks. Sometimes when you get migraines, it curls into a ball between your feet and purrs. 

* * *

One afternoon, you’re sitting on the edge of the roof, taking in the noises below without hearing them, when your host suddenly starts asking questions about some TV show’s plot. 

“What?” you ask. 

The man is leaning against the roof’s edge. He’s shielding his eyes from the sun and squinting at the building across the street. “The lady on the second floor. She turned her TV to another angle and now I can’t watch it through her window.”

There is no TV in this house. You used to think it was needed, but it isn’t. You used to want to be needed, and considered that important as well. 

“I don’t know,” you say apologetically, but you also don’t care at all. You get upset by your own absence of feelings. Did you ever have true sentiments, or have you been performing all this time? The thought of this makes you very angry, and very sad. You go back inside to sleep. 

* * *

You keep to the greenhouse and care for the plants. Leaves grow and die, unfurling out into the world like an open palm and curling up into a fist as they dry. 

One particular plant is struggling to survive. You bring it to the man. He tells you to throw it out. 

“Okay,” you say, twining your arms around the pot. 

You bring it to your room and put it on your windowsill so you can watch it from the bed. Every day, another green leaf turns steadily yellow, then brown, then falls to the floor where it crunches underneath your feet as you get up to use the bathroom.

One morning, you watch dew dot the windows behind the only remaining green leaf. You reach out and slide your finger along a running vein of condensation. It traces a path on the window. You pull your hand back immediately. But this is your space, isn’t it? You’re allowed to change it.

Frowning, you reach out and draw another line, then another. You make a fern, a funny face, a cat. Each stroke reveals part of the grey outside world, but it isn’t as threatening when consumed in tiny portions.

You ask the man for scissors. You shorten your hair and cut off the one part of the plant that is still green. You gather up the hair and the fallen leaves in a dustpan and throw both away, along with the old plant’s naked stem. You put the cutting in a glass of water. 

The leaf stays green. 

* * *

It takes weeks, perhaps months. The plant grows roots in the water. You’re worried about transplanting it, so you make other cuttings out of the new leaves when it gets big. You add some other doomed plants from the greenhouse, and try to propagate them too. Most don’t take, but enough do that your windowsill is now verdant, casting green and purple shadows on the walls and floor on sunny days.

When it rains, you cover the inside of the windows with shapes and words. In the greenhouse, you stand on tables between budding flowers to reach the ceiling and draw birds with your fingertips. 

It gets easier to stay awake. 

You read books to fill the time and write notes between the lines. It echoes your thoughts as if it’s correspondence with the outside world, present and past.

* * *

You eye a cane at a garage sale. You don’t really need it, you think. Walking doesn’t hurt all the time. Surely someone else deserves it.

You eye the plants in the greenhouse. Several have support from sticks or threads, and you never asked yourself whether they deserved them or not. 

You go back and buy the cane, along with some mismatched permanent markers. You draw vines wrapping around the cane’s length. 

* * *

One early morning you step out of your room and onto the roof, stretching like the cat. Perhaps you’ve been a decoration, too, for a while. 

The city beneath you is twinkling in the murky dawn. 

You pack your bag. You now own more than you came with, yet you feel much lighter. The man watches you in silence from the doorway, cup of smog in hand. His pyjamas are striped white and purple today. It looks good. 

He hands you the book he was reading long ago in the bathtub. 

“I already have it,” you say. 

He shakes his head, insists. “This one isn’t sad.” 

* * *

You get out, and you don’t come back this time. You meet people, lose people. Befriend more than you leave. 

You get a new place, in a new town. It’s tiny and the bathroom has a leak, but it’s yours. 

You put a cup beneath the leaking pipe. You can use the water for your plants. They are offspring of the ones you grew back then.

As you unpack your boxes, wondering where all these things came from, you find the book the man gave you and start reading it.

There are leaves pressed between each chapter. You smile when they fall out as you turn the pages. He was right: it’s not sad at all.

Mile H. is a drifting archivist with an interest in using old or unusual things to create new, queerer things. Surrounded by cats and found family, they nurture countless hobbies and a whole lot of hope. Sometimes they write. They aspire to moonlight as a raccoon.

Content Notes

Reclaiming Our Roots

Hanna A. Nirav

Before the shuttle even touched down, Reina’s life was already in danger.

Through the glass, she could see the trees shaking wildly, their massive branches slapping against each other in promised violence. Inside the shuttle, alarms blared from every direction, anticipating an attack.

But Reina was expecting this. She knew her first visit to Earth would not be welcomed, and she had come prepared.

She flicked on autopilot, letting it handle the last few feet of descent, and grabbed her pack. Standing by the exit, she checked and double-checked her gear. Her heart was beating fast, her breathing a little short; she inhaled deeply, exhaled, and waited.

The shuttle landed with a loud thud. Reina threw the door open and hit the ground running.

The world around her screamed to life. The Earth shook beneath her feet, tremors growing in magnitude with every step she took. She heard the sound of metal groaning as it buckled under unrelenting pressure and knew, without glancing back, that her shuttle was gone.

An inhuman screech ripped through the air. Reina felt the wind shift, the ground crumbling beneath her feet as she ran. She tucked in her chin and pumped her legs faster.

Ahead, the outpost came into view. It was surrounded by a metal fence, a stark contrast against the earthen colours of the forest it stood in. The gate of the fence was open, and beyond that, the front door was as well. 

As she approached the fence, the threat at her heels began to slow. Reina leapt across the yard and slid through the building’s entrance. A pair of arms grabbed her and hauled her indoors before the door slammed shut behind her.

The world fell silent. Reina was safe.

* * *

“You’re fast,” Dr. Nandini a/p Sivakumar said, placing a cup of hot tea in front of Reina. “Do you run often?”

“It’s good exercise,” she replied, still catching her breath. The bitter tea scalded her tongue. When she set her cup down, it clinked noisily against the matching saucer. Her hands were still shaking, so she folded them in her lap.

“Ah, to be young.” Nandini sat down across from her.

It was only then that Reina noticed the plant growing out of Nandini’s back.

It was a massive fern palm with fronds growing outwards to each side like clipped wings. The leaves were a lush, healthy green, unlike anything Reina had ever seen in her years of lab work. It rustled as Nandini shifted to cross her legs, a soft susurrus that echoed her every gesture.

Reading about it in the reports was one thing, but seeing it with her own eyes sent a wave of apprehension through her. If things went well, Reina would soon have her own symbiont growing out of her. What plant would it be? How large would it get? Where would it grow from? Heart pounding, she tore her gaze from the fern palm only to find Nandini watching her.

Nandini smiled, flashing teeth. “Shall I show you around?”

At first glance, the outpost wasn’t very big, its layout identical to what they had back on the mothership. Reina would have been able to triangulate the layout of the building — the main lab, the clean rooms, the machines, cold storage, the dorm, the kitchen — all from the main entrance, if not for the flora covering every inch of the facility. It wasn’t just the various plants cultivated in neat, orderly rows, each tucked into their own labelled container for easy reference. There was vegetation growing everywhere. Buttress roots cut across the hallway, dressed with a smattering of vines and flowers dangling from cracks in the ceiling. Reina turned a corner and smacked her face right into a cluster of leaves, curling out from the walls at eye level. In the hall outside the clean rooms, she tripped over a tangle of roots and smashed her elbow into the closed door.

Nandini, who navigated the plants with ease, only chuckled. Reina’s cheeks went hot as she pushed herself back up, but she said nothing.

They arrived, at last, at the dorm: a modestly-sized room fitted with two beds and matching dressers. In the furthest corner, a massive mangosteen tree towered over them, its leaves flattened against the ceiling.

“Do you need time to settle in?” Nandini asked.

After Reina’s long trip, the bed looked invitingly soft, and she felt herself swaying towards it. But she didn’t come here to rest. She had fought hard for this opportunity, had given up nearly everything back on the mothership to come to Earth. She had to make sure it was worth it.

So she dropped her bags by the foot of the bed and turned away. “No,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

Nandini led her back to the lab and beckoned for her to sit by the worktable. As Nandini unpacked equipment, Reina glanced around the room, which looked as overgrown as the rest of the building. On the other side was the crown jewel of Nandini’s research: Raya Hitam, a massive black hibiscus that looked far more eerie in real life than it ever did in the reports. Its roots were slender but numerous, jutting out of cracks in its pot and spreading across the large table. Its leaves were large, its one flower larger still, an intimidating mass of black petals.

“So, what made you decide to come here?” Nandini asked.

The question took Reina by surprise, so much that she nearly missed the jab of a  needle into her skin. She watched, dazed, as Nandini carefully pulled back the plunger of the syringe and Reina’s blood began to fill the barrel.

“Well?” Nandini asked.

Reina glanced at her, but Nandini’s gaze was trained on her work. “It’s an opportunity of a lifetime,” she said. “I’d be a fool to refuse.”

“Equally a fool to accept. You know the mortality rates down here.”

Reina bit back her initial response, swallowing the surge of irritation until she could calmly reply, “The money is good. The learning experience is even better. Everyone’s fighting to be a part of this project back on the ship, you know. They’re all calling you the pioneer that will one day lead humankind back home.”

Nandini chuckled. “Quick on her feet and honey-tongued at that. I better watch myself.” 

Before Reina could think of a response to that, Nandini gestured for her to follow and crossed the room to Raya Hitam.

As Nandini approached, the black flower shivered. When Nandini opened her arms, every leaf and petal of Raya Hitam turned gently towards her.

Reina had read the reports, long before she’d even heard about the opportunity to come work with Nandini. Even then, she had been equal parts incredulous and hopeful. To see proof of Nandini’s research before her eyes — it was miraculous.

Nandini tipped the vial, dripping blood onto Raya Hitam. The black flower reached up to meet it halfway, letting it trickle between its petals and down along the length of its stem. Its leaves curled up, caressing the blood as it travelled down onto the soil beneath.

A bud grew just beneath the flower, blossoming and peeling back to reveal a small fruit within seconds. When it stopped, it was about the size of a 5-sen coin.

“There,” Nandini said. “You’ve read my notes. You know what to do next.”

Reina did. She reached out and gently plucked the fruit, half-expecting Raya Hitam to surge forward and swallow her whole, but the plant remained as still as the walls around them. 

Reina sat down on one of the nearby stools and allowed herself only a brief moment’s hesitation before she popped the fruit into her mouth and swallowed.

Her world went dark.

* * *

Silence. 

The sense of a vast, empty space unfurling in every direction. All was calm, a serenity achieved by the knowledge that everything here was safe. There was no danger because every possible threat had been purged. Everything was a piece that fit perfectly into the next, small snippets of a bigger picture. All was well.

Then: an intrusion.

Something else was here, something that didn’t belong. A clumsy, foreign thing now walked among them, every gesture harsh and loud in this easy peace they had built.

The silence receded, starting from the source and spreading outward. In its absence rose a thunderous roar. 

This invasion would not be tolerated. 

* * *

The dream shattered into fragments, tangling with reality and drawing her into a brief, liminal space. Consciousness drifted back to her, pierced by bursts of light and words too garbled for her to make sense of. Bitterness flooded her mouth, then receded. There was a brief, ear-piercing screech that eventually faded into a tinny sound, lost in the background.

Reina woke to leaves dangling in front of her eyes.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

Reina jerked upright. The leaves — which looked like one of the passion fruit species, if she wasn’t mistaken — moved with her, brushing her nose before swaying back to that same distance from her eyes. She stared at them, before reaching up to touch them.

It felt normal enough, if having leaves growing from the center of your forehead was in any way normal. Reina could feel the way the leaves were jutting out from her skull, beginning just beneath her skin. The whole thing would have been bizarre, if she hadn’t been anticipating this since she first applied to be Nandini’s assistant.

“Can you stand?” Nandini asked. “I want to run a few tests.”

Reina obliged in a daze, her thoughts still sap-thick. The world around her looked different in a way she couldn’t understand, the lights a strange kind of bright and the walls an unsettling presence. Her mind felt heavy, weighed down by stray thoughts she never managed to fully process before they faded away.

“— you hear me?” Nandini was asking.

“Yes,” Reina croaked, then blinked at the tourniquet she couldn’t remember being wrapped around her arm. She swallowed, tried again. “No. Can you repeat that?”

“Spend the next twenty-four hours however you like, but I want you to record everything you experience. It doesn’t matter if you think the details are unimportant, just jot them down. We’ll go over your notes tomorrow and compare them with the existing data.”

That snagged Reina’s attention. “The existing data. That’s from your previous assistants, right?”

“Mmhmm.” Nandini didn’t look up from scribbling in her notepad.

Reina hesitated, wondering if there was a way to phrase her next question delicately. “How exactly did the forest kill them?”

“I think it’s a little late to start worrying about that now,” Nandini said.

Reina bit back another flash of annoyance and said, “I’m just curious. The reports said they died but didn’t go into specifics. If I know what to expect, I might be able to avoid it.”

Nandini sighed. “It’s the same thing every time. During those last few days, they’d get a little quiet, a little distant. I’d see them staring into space and mumbling to the plants. Eventually, they’d start sleepwalking out into the forest. I managed to catch them a few times before they got too far. But no matter what I did, they always wandered off again and never came back. I suppose you could say the forest took them.”

That much Reina knew. An overwhelming percentage of the previous expeditions here had ended in death. The plant life was the executing hand of the Earth, doling out retribution for any who dared overstay their welcome. For the blessed few like Nandini, that welcome apparently lasted years. For others, a handful of minutes on solid ground was all they had.

No matter. Whatever this Earth threw at her, Reina would prove she could handle it.

* * *

Now that she had some time to herself, Reina tried to explore the outpost. Yet everywhere she turned, she seemed to collide bodily with plants. She tripped more times than she bothered to keep track of; they seemed to position themselves perfectly to inconvenience her. Twice now, she had found herself turned around from her intended destination for no reason other than getting distracted by avoiding the flora.

After having fought tooth and nail for this job, it made her feel silly to write Plant life in facility appears to be messing with me in her reports, but she dutifully noted it as instructed.

Although none of her interactions with the plants so far had been dangerous, Reina began to dread them. If they didn’t show any sign of tolerating her, would she be sent back? How much time would Nandini give her? Would Reina have come this far only to fail?

“Interesting,” Nandini said when Reina shared her observations. “But you haven’t been badly hurt?”

“No,” Reina said, wondering if “Not yet” would be more accurate, given Nandini’s surprised tone. She gestured to the leaves growing from her forehead. “I haven’t seen anything from these yet, though.”

“Hmm,” Nandini said, and reached out to flick the leaves.

That sent a jolt through Reina; she had felt that gesture, even though she was certain Nandini hadn’t touched her skin. Reina lifted her own hand, but this time all she felt was leaves against her fingertips.

“Maybe you’ll last longer than the others after all,” Nandini said. “Shall we try going outside?”

No, Reina wanted to say. The plants in the outpost hadn’t reacted positively to her so far. How would going outside be any different? In fact, wouldn’t it just be worse? Was Nandini trying to get her killed?

No, Reina told herself. This was what she had signed up for. She took a deep breath, pushing back the panic, and said, “Yes.”

They stopped at the fence that marked the boundary of the outpost. A low breeze was passing by, the forest whispering with the wind. The day was bright and the sunlight filtered down through the tree canopy to a gentle heat that warmed Reina’s skin. It would have been peaceful if she wasn’t so acutely aware that this forest had taken the lives of billions before her.

“Since the Earth rose up and drove humanity into the stars, it has always protected its own. By carrying these seedlings, we are signalling that we — that is, humanity — and the Earth can exist harmoniously. At the very least, it is a gesture that we are willing to learn. This is especially important for our work here, as I’m sure you’ll recall from the interview.”

Reina nodded along politely. Throughout the application process, she had been grilled ruthlessly about her willingness to work with Earth, to learn what she could and use it to further this project. And even if she hadn’t, Nandini had always emphasised it in her recorded presentations, even if most of the information had been hidden behind dubiously worded confidentiality terms. She glanced at Nandini and asked the question she had been curious about since she first read about Nandini’s work. “What about Raya Hitam?”

Nandini paused. “What about it?”

“Where did it come from?” Reina gestured to the leaves now framing her vision. “Your reports discuss the seedlings and their potential, but none of them explain Raya Hitam’s origins.” 

Nandini was silent for a moment longer. “Where do you think it came from?”

Reina blinked, caught off guard by the sudden turnabout. Was this a test? And if that were the case, why?

Seeing her hesitation, Nandini chuckled. “Go on. I won’t bite.”

“Well... I would guess that you found it here, in the forest. It’s not in the library databases, so it’s either an undiscovered species or a completely new one that’s only developed recently.” Reina crossed her arms. “Either way, was there only one of its kind or did you find more? Did the forest let you take it, or did you only manage to harvest one specimen before it retaliated?” 

Here, Reina stopped. Nandini was smiling at her, a small, startling sight.

“Stick around here for more than a week,” Nandini said, “and maybe I’ll tell you. Now, on with the experiment.”

Reina cleared her throat nervously. “So you want me to just... go out there?”

“Basically,” Nandini agreed. “Stick close for now, though, until we have an idea of how the Earth will react.”

Reina cast her gaze over the forest. She had the distinct feeling she was being watched. “And you’ll stay here?”

At this, Nandini smiled again. “The forest already knows me. I don’t want to skew the data.”

Another test, and this time Nandini was being upfront about it. There was no better time to prove herself than now. Reina took a deep breath and stepped past the fence.

Instantly, the Earth roared to life, just as it had when she’d first landed. The trees shook violently and the ground beneath her feet collapsed, making her stumble backwards. She felt Nandini’s fingers close around her arm and yank her back across the threshold. Just as abruptly, the ground stilled, leaving only a gaping hole where she had stood.

Reina’s forehead itched where the leaves jutted out of her skin. Nandini gently pushed her away, and Reina realised how close they’d been standing, her shoulder pressed into Nandini’s chest.

Nandini cleared her throat and said, “Again.”

Reina glanced at the hole in the ground. “Did any of your previous assistants die from this?”

“Only my first,” Nandini said. “Don’t worry. If it gets too dangerous, I’ll step in. The forest won’t hurt me.”

They repeated the exercise over and over for what felt like hours, and got the same results every time. When Reina’s knees finally buckled under her, Nandini relented.

They were right back at it the next day, and the day after. Reina didn’t notice a difference until the third day, when she was able to take a few steps forward before the forest reacted. Progress got quicker after that, and it wasn’t long before Reina was getting as far as five meters from the perimeter before being attacked.

When a torrent of roots burst out of the ground, she was expecting it. She dodged out of its path, turned her back, and sprinted for the safety of the yard. The roots followed her up to the last possible moment before sagging listlessly onto the ground.

Nandini’s smile was radiant. “This is much better progress than the others ever managed.”

That acknowledgement sent warmth blossoming in Reina’s chest. She hated the feeling as much as she savoured it. “Good,” she managed between pants, and didn’t dare say anything else.

There was a pause before Nandini said, “Let’s take a break for today.”

Reina looked up, protest already on the tip of her tongue. But Nandini was reaching a hand out towards her, a smaller, softer smile nestled in her lips. 

“Don’t argue with me. You’ve earned it. We’ll continue tomorrow.”

Reina swallowed and accepted the help up. As she followed Nandini back into the facility she eyed the fern palm that spilled down from the other woman’s back, trailing after her like an extravagant cape. Reina reached up and touched the leaves dangling from her forehead. 

Nandini, she reminded herself, was not a friend. It was easy to forget that when it was just the two of them here, spending nearly every hour together. Nandini was easy company, but it didn’t change the fact that she was Reina’s supervisor and team lead, as well as the brightest star of their field. Nandini, she reminded herself, was the goal to beat.

* * *

Reina dreamt of a large, wide expanse. The space was filled with numerous lifeforms, their roots tangled so deeply and thoroughly that there was no hope of separating them without cutting right through them. Their stems twined up towards the sky, supporting and being supported with every breath. Here was their space, safe from danger. Here, they protected each other.

Occasionally, something rotten would drip between them, a foreign toxin that poisoned everything it touched.

No matter. Toxins could be isolated and neutralised. Those wounded were rehabilitated where possible, otherwise purged. This space would survive, at any cost. This was non-negotiable.

Reina woke.

A branch of the mangosteen tree was stretched out towards her, the sharp ends of its fruitless twigs hovering less than an inch from her face. Reina blinked and saw the twigs curl a fraction closer. She jerked away, scrambling across her bed, heart thundering in her chest.

The tree stilled instantly. Then, it withdrew, wood creaking as the branch twisted itself back and up. Once its twigs brushed the ceiling, the whole tree shivered, leaves rustling in tandem as if being caressed by an invisible breeze. And then, the tree fell still.

Reina sat for a moment longer, staring, before jolting out of the room.

“Interesting,” Nandini said as Reina recounted the experience.

Reina downed the last of her tea in one large gulp. “I think it was trying to kill me.”

“It wasn’t,” Nandini said. “The plants within the facility are harmless. It was a prank, at worst.”

Reina frowned. “You sound so certain.”

“That’s because I am certain. In fact, I believe the tree wanted to get to know you. That’s a huge step in the right direction. You should be pleased.”

Something in Nandini’s tone made her wonder, “Are you speaking from experience, Doctor?”

At this, Nandini went quiet. Then: “Do you know why this Earth rejects us so?”

Reina did in fact know. She had heard the story from her late grandfather, who had heard it from his grandmother, who presumably had heard it from her own grandparent.  “The Earth got angry with us, with our ancestors. Our way of life was doing too much harm, so it had to get rid of us.”

Nandini shot her an impressed look. “Exactly. We used to live with the Earth, sustaining each other. But somewhere along the way, we lost sight of that and began living only for ourselves.” Nandini got up and began pacing. The fern palm on her back swished along with her movements. “If humanity wants to return to Earth someday, we have to reestablish that mutually beneficial relationship — and to do that, we have to learn how to communicate.”

Reina thought again of the mangosteen tree, branch held out to her like an outstretched hand. 

Nandini continued, “So the big question is... how do the plants here communicate with each other? I believe they view each other as parts of a larger, singular entity.” 

Reina recalled her recent dreams. “Go on.”

“I speculated that in order to communicate with this entity, I had to get the Earth to accept me as part of itself. So I started transplanting parts of the plants here on Earth into myself.” Nandini smiled wryly. “When that just made me violently sick, I tried it the other way around.”

Reina stared at her. “You transplanted parts of yourself into the plants?”

“No, no, I didn’t get that far. I started out with hair and nail clippings, then skin cells and blood. None of those seemed to work either, except for one.”

“Blood?” she guessed.

“That’s right. It was actually one of the common weeds. The rest of its batch died, but this one particular sample seemed to thrive when I gave it my blood. One night, I heard noises coming from the lab. When I went to check, it had transformed, somehow, into the black flower we now know as Raya Hitam.” She finally stopped pacing and shrugged. “The rest you know from the reports.”

“But why?” Reina asked, frustrated. She’d thought she would be glad to finally learn the story of Raya Hitam. Instead, she felt only an irritated hollowness in her chest. “Why are you the only one the forest likes?”

Nandini hesitated and sat back down. “I have a theory.”

Reina waited. When Nandini didn’t immediately continue, she said, “If you need me to sign an NDA first...”

Nandini laughed. “No, that’s all right. I think I trust you.”

Reina swallowed hard around the sudden lump in her throat.

“I believe the reason none of my previous assistants were able to replicate my success is that they couldn’t accept the Earth’s motivations.” Nandini shook her head. “I made it a requirement of the job, so of course they all claimed to believe it, but it’s easy to just parrot the philosophy. I believe the Earth saw through them.”

Reina frowned. “I don’t understand. They didn’t believe the Earth was reclaiming its space?”

Nandini shook her head. “No, they didn’t accept that what the Earth is doing is right. They didn’t believe the Earth should be staking claim to a space that had once been taken from it, guarding against outsiders... it’s a very particular imperative that I understand well. As do you, I believe.”

Reina froze. “Excuse me?”

“We’re alike, you and I,” Nandini said. “We both know what it’s like to fight for the right to exist by our own rules, in a space that was once ours.”

A chill prickled between Reina’s shoulder blades. It spread down her spine, wrapping itself around her chest and sinking deep into her lungs. The leaves on her forehead dangled low. “How did you find out?”

“I used to see you often at The Rose Circle.”

“Oh,” Reina whispered.

“When I saw your application, I recognised you right away. None of the other applicants were familiar to me, so I figured you were the best bet.”

“So that’s why I’m here?” Reina asked, not wanting to believe it even as the words left her mouth. “Not because you were impressed with my work or interested in my proposals?” 

Nandini met her gaze evenly. “I picked you because we’re similar.”

Without another word, Reina stood and left. The leaves bounced against her cheek as she stormed through the facility, threw open the front door, and stepped outside. 

The Earth greeted her with silence.

Of course it did. As long as she was within the facility’s perimeter, the forest treated her as part of Nandini and thus unthreatening.

Nandini’s voice cut through the silence. “Reina?”

Reina took a deep breath and started running.

At first, the Earth barely reacted, the ground shaking minutely at intervals. Then, as she ran further into the forest, the trembling began to build until she had to fight to keep her footing. 

But that didn’t matter because, somehow, it always came down to the same thing.

For years, Reina had kept her head down and her mouth shut. She knew the rules, knew that she was expected to portray herself a particular way in order to exist, both in public and in private. Past a certain point, who she was at her core was irrelevant. All that mattered were the criteria by which she was judged, a checklist of attributes dictated to her. It had made her feel like an impostor, an outsider in a space that claimed to accept her.

Reina had thought she’d left all of that behind on the mothership. She’d thought that here, none of it would matter anymore. It was infuriating to realise that she had never been more wrong in her entire life.

Around her, the forest was exploding with noise. A hundred massive roots burst from the Earth with a deep, heart-wrenching roar. The sheer immensity of it slammed into her chest, robbing her of breath. She stumbled, knees thudding against the ground as she gasped, trying to fight back the panic.

She looked up to see the vengeance of the Earth towering over her: roots and vines and leaves twined together in an enormous cresting wave that blocked out the sky, the clouds, the sun. As she watched in frozen terror, it surged down towards her.

Reina realised she was going to die here. 

She would be crushed, swallowed wholly by a planet that never forgot and never forgave. Everything she had ever worked for, all the sacrifices she had made to come to Earth — none of it mattered in the end, because nothing had changed. Everyone played by the same rules, even this planet that had once been home.

And it wasn’t fair.

Vines exploded from her skin. Green tendrils curled around her arms and legs, taking hold of her unresisting body. In an instant, Reina was cocooned in plant life.

She felt the ground open up beneath her just as the impact hit, plunging her deep into the bowels of the Earth. Her world became dark.

Then it was quiet.

* * *

Once more, that enormous expanse of space, stretching out in every direction. All was quiet and still, every remaining trace of motion fading away.

And in that place, trapped inside where she could neither run nor struggle, was Reina.

Her head felt like it was about to burst. She could feel the seedling growing inside her, spreading its roots down her neck and along her spine. It felt like she was being flayed, laid bare to be scrutinised and judged by the Earth.

It shouldn’t matter. She shouldn’t have to prove her right to a place that should have been hers unconditionally. And once in that space, she shouldn’t have to prove, over and over again, that she belonged there. 

And yet, she had spent her whole life up to this second doing just that.

“It’s not fair!” she screamed, choking on the words. There wasn’t enough air to breathe; she felt like she was suffocating. Hot tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, and her chest burned with the weight of decades of resentment.

The Earth did not want her as she was. There was no place for her here, just as there was no place for her on the mothership. It didn’t matter if the spaces were public or private, widely acknowledged or spoken of in hushed whispers. She could fight it for the rest of her life, and she’d probably die still fighting.

“I deserve to be here,” Reina whispered to the Earth. “This place belongs to me, too.”

And the worst part of it all was how badly she wanted to believe it was true. She wanted to believe that she could belong, without losing sight of who she was. 

She wanted, she realised, to stop fighting.

And then the Earth opened up and spat her back out.

* * *

She felt the unyielding ground hit her, sending her rolling. When she blinked her eyes open, she found herself staring up at the blue sky, framed by giant trees and the familiar slope of the outpost. The pounding in her head receded. Reina blinked again and realised: the Earth had chosen not to kill her.

“Reina?”

She tried to get up, but her legs were shaking too badly and she stumbled forward once more. The vines had withered, falling off of her in pieces and leaving only the leaves resting against her forehead. Hands grabbed at her, jostling the parts of her that were sore and bruised.

“Reina, what happened?” Nandini demanded.

Reina looked up to meet Nandini’s wide-eyed, frightened gaze, their faces only inches apart.

“I hated that bar,” Reina said.

Nandini blinked. 

“The rules, the people that ran it. I hated everything about it. Dress like this and act like that. Different names on the outside, same shit on the inside.”

“Oh,” Nandini said, looking a little lost.

“We’re not the same. Just because I’m —” Reina paused meaningfully, “doesn’t mean we’re exactly alike.”

“Yes, of course. I know that —”

“But do you?” she interrupted. She caught Nandini’s gaze and held it. “You picked me because you expected me to be a certain way, to share certain values with you, but what if I don’t? Will I still be welcome here?”

“That’s —”

“Because I want to be here,” Reina said, and as the words rushed out of her, she felt her anger dissipate with it. Suddenly, she felt exhausted. “But I shouldn’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not.” 

“I’d never ask you to,” Nandini said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I’m not trying to force anything onto you. ”

Reina scoffed. “That’s what they always say.”

Nandini grabbed her hands and clasped them tightly, briefly, before letting go. “I won’t. I promise.”

Reina turned away, blinking rapidly. Her throat felt tight. “You know, your four years of research here could basically be summarised as The Earth has a gaydar.”

Nandini snorted, a sudden, ungraceful sound that seemed to take them both by surprise. She cleared her throat, her features tucking themselves back into place. The leaves on her back shook minutely before stilling. “I’ve been right so far, though, haven’t I? The Earth didn’t harm you.”

Here, Reina hesitated. There was a good chance Nandini wouldn’t react well to someone — especially her research assistant — suggesting that her hypothesis may be false. 

Nandini frowned. “You don’t agree?”

“Not exactly,” Reina said hastily. “It’s just... I was so furious earlier, more than I remember ever being in my entire life. I didn’t like the idea that only certain people would be welcome here. I thought it was unfair. This planet used to be a home for all of us. If humankind ever does manage to return here, everyone should be welcomed back.”

“Sometimes life isn’t fair,” Nandini said, waving a hand dismissively.

“Then we should make it fair,” Reina insisted. “That’s what I was thinking earlier, and it felt like the seedling reacted to that. It tried to protect me from the forest, right before the ground swallowed me whole. And then afterwards... well, I was still angry, and I think the Earth was listening somehow, right up to the point where it put me back here.”

She met Nandini’s gaze. “I think there’s something else the Earth saw in me. And maybe in you as well. How did you feel back when you first walked into that lab and saw Raya Hitam? What were your thoughts when you first began this project? What was your state of mind like when your seedling first reacted to you?”

Nandini didn’t answer immediately, but her frown had eased into a more thoughtful expression. “Interesting,” she said at last. “I’ll have to take another look at my old notes.”

That was a better reaction than Reina had dared to hope for. She exhaled, and perhaps her relief was a little too obvious because Nandini chuckled. “Sorry,” Reina said, embarrassed.

“No need,” Nandini said, already turning back to the facility entrance. “This means we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. Going through all my old notes will take weeks. Then we’ll have to revise all the tests and put together an updated presentation for the meeting next month —”

“Doctor,” Reina interrupted. She waited until Nandini glanced back at her before continuing, “So... I’m staying?”

Nandini raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

There was no word to describe the emotion Reina was experiencing now. It was like a lifetime’s worth of apprehension was being drained out of her, leaving her body feeling light, almost buoyant. Reina  felt like she had reached the end of what had seemed to be an eternal tightrope, and now she was taking her first step onto a wide stretch of land, where she could rest. 

“Yes,” she managed, almost choking on the word.

Nandini nodded, and that was that. “Now, hurry up. Like I said, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And when it’s just the two of us, you can drop the ‘doctor,’” Nandini added. “I have a feeling we’ll be working together for quite some time.”

Reina smiled. “All right, Nandini,” she said, and followed her back into the outpost.

Hanna A. Nirav is a writer who has been telling stories all her life. She is an avid reader, hardcore casual gamer and loves food. As a Malay-Indian Malaysian, she has always toed the line between circles and is now ready to break some rules. Her work has been previously published in Malaise from Jessamine Press and Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness from Neon Hemlock Press, as well as a few zines. You can find her on Twitter @hanstilltweets or check out her work at hanmuses.wordpress.com.

Content Notes

How to Make a Spell Jar

EA Crawley

The sky is a watery, Venetian blue and the corn is well over knee-high by the Fourth of July, stretching up for the cloud-cracked ceiling. In a tidy square cleared out of the Illinois fields, the Tazewell County 4-H Fair of 1997 has ground to a halt, as jams and jellies and marmalades drop out of the sky like sugary meteors and liquify wherever they land: apricots sizzling on the tin roof of the bathroom block; raspberry preserves lurching down the side of the awards pavilion; a half-exploded jar of wild carrot jelly rolling up against Ash Cullinane’s purple high-top sneaker. 

Ash nuzzles the jar with her heel, tipping the last of the jelly out into the grass. It sputters and flashes like a sparkler, little flecks of light popping out and dissipating into tendrils of smoke. She watches them go with a bit of awe, still in disbelief that she’s done magic — that she blew the roof off a whole 4-H tent all on her own. Maybe there was something about the jars Belle gave her, or the way Mom helped stir the pectin, or Dad tightened the lids? But if it was any of those things, then it was her, too. Her recipe selection. Her careful harvest. Her solemn intention to show these people who she really is and what she can do. 

Ash looks back to the demolished domestic-engineering tent, taking in all the crying girls scattered around the scene like pastel Easter eggs turned out of a basket. Stern judges in heavy skirts and doily hairnets flap their kerchiefs in dismay. Ash balls her hands into fists and presses them against her neon-yellow bicycle shorts. 

“Well, I’ll be about damned,” she says. To her left, her 4-H leader, Belle Hawthorn, lets out a snort.

It’s not that Ash shouldn’t be pleased with herself. It’s that Belle never expected her very first student of magic to debut quite so explosively. Most spell jars emit a soft light or dispel some bad energy. She had figured on having time to teach Ash the precautions one must take with magic in the Corn Belt, like Don’t do magic in the open and Have a cover story for when you inevitably do magic in the open. Instead, here they stand in the debris of Belle’s miscalculation.

She slides her grip down her outdoor walking stick — a sturdy oak staff she cured, varnished, and enchanted — and bends one knee to reach the broken jar. She can still feel the residue of magic on the glass: airy and insistent, in between places and looking for purchase. Ash has taken a pen to the tag taped to the bottom, slashing the “l-e-y” out of her pre-printed entry label, revealing her name. Bless her.

Belle nods, tucks Ash’s finished spell of self-discovery into her massive crochet satchel, and straightens again with a wince. Ash is looking at her, the starts of apprehension blooming on her round, tanned face, and Belle smooths the kid’s haywire Dorothy Hamill bob. 

“I won’t tell a soul,” Belle says.

Ash sighs in relief. “About the magic? It was magic, right?”

“Yes. Name magic, as it turns out, and herbal. In a spell jar.”

“And you’ll always call me Ash? Just between us?”

“I will,” Belle confirms. “And you can tell other people when you’re ready.”

“Cool.” Ash glances at Belle’s bag, at the sharp bulge that is her nuked 4-H project. “I made a spell jar?”

“Yeah,” Belle says. Parents swoop around them, a sea of plaid and starched lace, culottes and pleated-front khakis. The air smells vaguely of diesel and perm solution, but beyond that lingers something crisp and clean and bright — the floral remnants of Ash’s spell, the pure essence of a kid coming into their own. “Yeah, you sure did.”

* * *

How to Make a Spell Jar

1. Set Your Intention

Before Belle knows Ash is Ash, she calls together her small 4-H group in the back meeting room of the library — centrally located to make it easy for the kids who live out on islands of grass flushed out of the topsoil of their farms. 

The children are all unsettled in the way of children. Marguerite obviously can’t believe she’s here again, in this dingy room, with its farm-sale carpet growing mushrooms where it meets the water-damaged outer wall of the building. She adjusts her jodhpurs and flips her tight blonde ponytail, looking a lot like the horses she rides. Not well, but she rides them, and that’s more than enough to put her out of sorts with people who don’t. Joshua sits as still as a taw marble winding up for the next shot, playing for keeps. Belle is aware that he has a new goat to show, and that no one quite knows what happened to the last one. She’s got her eye on him. David — not Davey or Dave — sits as patient as ever, a child filled to the brim with questions he has learned to hold back like dam waters because the rest of the world can’t bear the flood. She makes it a point to let him spill over at least once a meeting, and she knows his parents hear him out, too. As does his younger sibling, Ash.

And Ash... Belle’s still working that one out. She’s noticed, for instance, the way Ash rolls her socks down to hide the ruffles and wears her school jumper hung around her shoulders like a scarf — something to be cared for since her mother went to all the trouble of pressing it, but nothing more than temporary. Ash takes care of her hairbands and clips as well, stuffing them in her pockets when they inevitably fall out as she flies around town on her sparkly purple bike, wind whipping all the Aussie hairspray out of her short curls. And then there’s just... the way of her, the way Ash moves like a joyful cricket when she’s on her own, but sits among others like a grizzled wolf, watching her peripheries, gearing up to survive the next intrusion. 

“We pledge,” begins Belle, and the kids chime in on the four Hs: Head, Heart, Hands, and Health. Then she asks for project updates. Marguerite still rides horses, Joshua has a goat for now, and David blinks, his teeth digging into his lip. Belle nods to him, and he launches into a description of the RadioShack circuitry kit his dad saved up to buy for him, and the kind of solder it takes to hold the diodes and transistors in place, and the very specific kind of lightbulb it will light up once it’s completed. Joshua groans at some point and Ash kicks him.

“The light is going to be bright orange,” Ash says proudly after David finishes.

He looks momentarily nonplussed by this additional detail before nodding. “Yes, but it’s not really about the aesthetics, it’s about the engineering.”

“Well, I just think it’s ridiculous 4-H even has an engineering event,” says Marguerite. David’s shoulders slump under the weight of her disdain.

“Oh boo,” says Belle. “Your daddy buys you horses with the money he makes off his grain elevator. You think he doesn’t understand his own equipment?”

Marguerite blushes, and Ash basks in it like a lizard. David straightens and pushes his glasses up his nose, chubby hand hiding the tiniest of smiles. Belle smirks. Perhaps she shouldn’t pick favorites, what with Marguerite’s dad on the village council, but on the other hand, screw it.

“And how’s your project going?”

Ash shuffles her feet. “My flowers died.” 

“Do you have a plan B?”

“Well.” Ash rubs her forehead with the back of her hand. “No. I mean, I looked in the project magazine, and all the stuff I can do is so...” She heaves a sigh. “None of it feels right. It’s all just... here’s a pretty thing being pretty.”

“I could teach you to solder,” says David, the way other kids say, “I’m sorry you’re sad.”

“Thanks.” Ash smiles. 

Belle purses her lips, sucking in stale library air and tasting the catalogue of it, wondering where Ash would shelve herself if she could. Maybe she doesn’t know yet, and that’s part of her frustration. Belle can understand that much — it took her years to reshelve herself post-accident, shifting the outlines of the things she knew about her life to make room for fuzzy pain days. She’d put up with her well-intentioned but inexperienced sister pottering about the livestock, petitioned her local craft fairs to create sites with accommodations, allowed her nephew to cut his contractor’s chops on the redesign of her house to suit new physical parameters. Ash’s got that same look about her now that she’s in fifth grade, aging out of childhood — her own type of bewildering self-negotiation full of fuzzy pain and new physicality. Maybe she also needs some help with the redesign.

“How about jams and jellies?” says Belle.

“What?” Ash scowls. 

“It’s perfect for you. Useful, sugary, and slightly dangerous.” Ash relaxes her face at that. “And you have to decide very carefully what goes into your canning jar. You can make jams and jellies out of nearly anything edible — fruits, flowers, vegetables — so that’s the tricky part. You have to figure out what you want to show the judges. What your ingredients mean to you.”

Ash’s eyes narrow like she’s squinting at a fire. “Really? Anything I want?”

Belle throws some fuel on the blaze. “Yep. You and your mom can even come out to my house to pick up some jars.”

“And David and Patrick.” Ash nods like she’s haggling.

“Yes,” David agrees. “I want to pet your cats.”

“I assumed.” Belle grins. “Meeting adjourned.”

* * *

2. Pick Your Jar

Belle’s house is one minotaur short of a labyrinth, and actually, she does have a prize bull she rents out for good money. She also has five goats, four cattle dogs, two horses, a parakeet, and a boatload of fish in the backyard pond and along her downstairs aquarium wall. Oh, and the cats — probably about seven of them now, which she leaves David and a toddling Patrick to pet as she gestures for Caroline and Ash to follow her down the back hallway. 

It’s nice to have the Cullinane family in her home. Belle had pretty much finished with visitors outside of kin after she heard someone down to the post office call her house a word that sounded damning of Belle herself. Maybe it wouldn’t have stung so much if so many people hadn’t nodded in agreement and started gossiping about how her cane use must curtail housekeeping. That’s the mundane for you. They’ll look right at homespun witchcraft — bundles of herbs hanging in the kitchen; grimoire pages on the living room shelves; themed rooms filled with doll parts, quilting fabrics, scrapbooking — and call it a hoard. They’ll look right at a witch, with a cane that can cast circles, direct familiars, and knock anyone right on their ass, and say she’s been curtailed. Chickenshit.

But neither Ash nor Caroline have ever pitied or underestimated her. Not the first time they met at a 4-H luncheon, shaking hands across a plastic tablecloth slathered with platters of bluegill and potato salad; not the sixteenth time at the Cullinane supper table, spread with Caroline’s handiwork — soft orange zest muffins, salmon patties with dill cream, cottage cheese and fresh peaches. Ash took it upon herself to decorate Belle’s cane with Starburst wrappers folded into a multicolored chain, and Caroline started keeping a curved ice pack in the freezer in case Belle’s knee acted up, and that was that. 

Maybe Caroline’s face is a little tight as she glances at Belle’s new collections, but her own home is neat as a pin, and Belle figures that’s the look of a woman who wants to organize rather than judge. Or perhaps it’s the look of a woman recognizing the snap of hunger as her magic meets the pull of Belle’s own, wordlessly, without full awareness of what they share. Belle hasn’t yet figured out how to tell Caroline she’s a stunning kitchen witch.

Ash... it remains to be seen. Her delight at the shelves of sequins and lace, her fascinated horror over the bags of glass doll eyes and tiny wigs — it could all just be childish glee. Or it could be like finding like, which is what Belle suspects to be the truth.

Belle pushes open the door to the last room on the left. She keeps it closed on account of the cats, and the dogs, and the parakeet, honestly. Thing’s like a lawn dart with wings. And this room, with its walls and tables full of glass — vases, lampshades, jars of all sizes, mirrors, muddling kits, candlesticks, you name it — is not made for lawn darts.

“Whoa,” says Ash, going straight for the strange stuff. “What’s this?”

“That’s the top of a gumball machine,” says Belle.

“And this?” Ash points at a structure shaped sort of like a small bell. 

Caroline smiles. “That’s a glass insulator cap. They used to protect open wire telephone junctions. When Dad first worked at the phone company, he had to climb up the poles and replace those with porcelain updates.”

“Did you ever go up the poles?”

“No.” Caroline purses her lips. “They started women as operators.”

“But you and Dad had the same job,” says Ash, fiercely, checking her facts.

“We ended up as central office technicians, yes,” says Caroline. “Different paths.” She angles a look at Belle. “Lot more grab-ass on mine.”

“Jackass, you mean,” Belle whispers back.

“And then you came home,” says Ash, inspecting a row of chemistry equipment. “Because Mom is your most important job.”

Caroline burns beside Belle, her magic flaring up so hot it raises the hair on Belle’s arms. “Damn straight.”

“Mom!” Ash giggles, and tiptoes over to the jars. “So, do I pick from here?”

Belle shakes her head. “Those are a little too oddly sized. I don’t have replacement sealants and rims for them. Look over there under the table, there’s a couple of boxes of small quilted jars. You can pick a pattern.”

Ash drops to her knees and skids across the room to investigate, emerging from the pile of boxes with her hairband askew and a flat of jars propped between her knobbly knees. “These,” she declares, and the air pops like a tiny storm breaking. Across the room a diamond-paned drinking glass shatters.

Ash’s eyes go wide. Belle watches her, assessing whether she’s surprised by the sound or by the way her aura is ricocheting around the room, near-missing a couple other items before resting back around her small shoulders. If Caroline sees it, she doesn’t let on. Belle figures that’s Midwest polite for you: everyone lives to be ninety-six out of sheer unwillingness to acknowledge the tattered specter of death. Might embarrass him.

“It happens from time to time,” Belle says. “The heat. I’ll clean it up later. Why don’t you go say hello to the animals?”

“Yeah,” Ash says. She sets the flat carefully on the floor, shivering as she breaks contact. Then she’s sprinting for the door, color high and eyes bright.

“And start thinking about your ingredients,” Belle calls after her.

* * *

3. Select Your Contents

Ash thinks about her ingredients. In the mornings, when she sits on the closed toilet and lets Mom curl her hair, protecting the tops of her ears from the iron. In the afternoons, when she goes to the park to read in the tree by the cracked basketball court (her latest Nancy Drew tucked into the hollow of the upper branches in a plastic gallon bag, George’s pages dog-eared). In the evenings, when she throws on the boxers and white t-shirts she begged for, crawling into bed looking like Dad or Grandpa. 

She considers raspberry and rejects it as too obvious. Blackberry could be cool, less common than Smucker’s grape, but they have those chunky cores, and she’s leaning toward something fluid. She rides along with Mom to the next town over and uses their library internet to print out a list of unusual preserves: kiwi jam, hot pepper jelly, violet and quince marmalade. But none of it feels right. Ash wants to share something she already knows about herself, not play dress-up in yet another way. She wants something... clarifying but changeable, sprightly and sure.

She’s trying to explain this to Mom when Belle comes by the house to drop off new potatoes and early strawberries, and to check on the progress of the project.

“I don’t know, I just...” Ash flips closed yet another recipe book. She doesn’t figure there’s a method in there that’ll match her — it’s mostly just recipes from passive-aggressive church ladies who protect their signature potluck dishes by purposely mismeasuring the amount of sugar or “forgetting” to tell you to peel the rhubarb. Ash wants her jelly to not only reflect her personality but also, you know, be exciting. She remembers her next-door neighbor, Golda, calling a Texas sheet cake “better than sex,” and all the adults laughing and nodding emphatically around mouthfuls, so that’s what comes out. “I want to make a jelly that’s better than sex.”

Mom does not laugh. Belle says, “You wanna do what now?” 

“I mean...” Ash looks between their faces, developing a grudge against Golda. “Something really, really good that people don’t get a lot of?” 

Mom stares pointedly at the kitchen curtains, and Belle makes a face. “You mean rare?”

“Yes! Exactly. Rare,” Ash says. “Kind of unusual, kind of, um...” She can feel herself blushing, not sure how this next bit will sound outside of her head. “Sort of handsome as well as pretty?” Okay, it sounds good. “Yes, like when Mom grills or does the banking or Dad goes to the grocery store or shines my school shoes. Like... me?”

Belle finally nods. “Beautiful and sturdy and free.”

“Yes.” Ash grips the edge of the kitchen table. “Free.”

“Tell you what,” Mom says, drying her hands on a kitchen towel. “My grandmother gave me a special encyclopedia.” She hauls a chair over to the fridge and steps up, opening the high cabinets with a waft of aging paper and holiday spices. “Here, North American Botanicals and Blooms. There’s a section on wildflowers, and at least half of those could become jelly.”

“Flowers, though.” Ash frowns.

“Wild ones,” Mom says. She sets the book on the kitchen table, checks the index, and flips the crinkled pages with her nimble operator’s fingers. “They’re basically weeds that grow at the edges of roads, and most of them are medicinal or culinary. Or deadly.”

Ash feels that declaration smooth her feathers back to neutrality. She browses for a while as the adults chat and finally lands on a wildflower she recognizes.

“Queen Anne’s Lace?” she says, tentatively. The name is a little frilly.

“Also known as wild carrot,” Mom says. She tilts her chin conspiratorially. “Most people don’t know you can turn its petals into jelly, but you can, and they taste like fresh air.”

Ash grins. “Can we make that?”

“Well, it depends,” says Belle. “You’ll need two tightly packed cups of petals. And you have to get them right as the dew dries and make the jelly same day, so you’re going to have to get up early and pedal like hell to get it all cut. You okay with that?”

“Yes. I have a satchel.”

Mom gives Ash a fond look, like the time Great Aunt Jane found Ash up a tree with a snag in her Sunday tights. “Perfect.”

* * *

4. Fill Your Jar

It’s a bright Illinois June, so Ash sets her alarm for six a.m. and is out the door by seven, a true sacrifice in the face of Gargoyles reruns. She rides out to the edge of town where the thickest patches of wild carrot grow between orderly cornfields and crowned asphalt. When the weed comes into view — all those upturned chandeliers of delicate white flowers on their fencing-foil stalks — Ash laughs. It does look like her. Robust, articulate, wild. 

She ditches her bike by the road and pulls a pair of kitchen shears and a measuring cup from her satchel, finding a likely clump of flowers. There are little black beetles all over the blooms, and she shakes them off before leaning in for a whiff. The scent is as fragrant as any perfume she’s ever smelled on the wealthier ladies in town, but better, because it’s sun-warm and rain-fed and soil-rooted, spreading outward like butter melting in a pan.

She snips flower heads for a long time, finding a rhythm and humming to herself while she works. She has to stop every once in a while to pick burrs out of her socks or wipe her forehead with the bandana she stole from Dad, but no one is around to bother her or interrupt the work. It’s just her, at the edge of things, snipping pieces of wilderness, occasionally pausing to suck the honey out of some clover or stare down the road with her hands on her hips like Grandma does. 

When the sun hits the gathering cumulus and tucks itself away pre-storm, Ash pedals back home and finds Mom in the kitchen, where she’s already sanitized the jars in the huge metal canning pot Ash has seen stored in the basement. 

“Well, don’t you look sun-kissed,” Mom says, and adds a Mom-kiss to Ash’s cheek. “Draw a cold sink of water and plunge the flowers to get the bugs off.”

“I shook them out.”

“Even so.”

Ash plunges the flowers and watches the remaining bugs scuttle to the surface, dipping them out with a sieve to rehome them in the front yard. Then she plucks two cups of petals with Mom, and helps measure out sugar and pectin and lemon juice. Dad walks by the kitchen windows a few times with the lawnmower, moving fast to beat the rain, his backup bandana sweaty around his salt and pepper hair. 

“He’s not going to make it,” Mom says matter-of-factly. She lifts her eyes to the sky and counts softly from one crack of lightning to the next roll of thunder. “Nope, too close.” 

The mower turns off in the front yard, and Dad rolls it into the garage. Ash catches a whiff of cigarette smoke mixed with the first raindrops. “Guess he heard you.”

“Oh, he’s the one who taught me to count storms off.” Mom grins. “And did you know he can dowse for water?”

“What’s that?”

“Well, he’ll have to show you when it’s not raining. That’d be cheating. Okay, come over here, we’re at a boil.”

Ash hooks the step stool with her foot and climbs it to dump her cupful of petals in with Mom’s. They give them a minute to wilt before Mom lifts the heavy pot off the burner and sets the petals aside to steep. Ash sets a timer and runs out to the garage to pull up a lawn chair by Dad while she waits. She mimics his lounge, hands in the pockets of her cutoffs, and he tugs gently on the stolen bandana tied around her forehead before testing the wind and blowing a plume of smoke away from her. 

After the steep, Mom brings the floral liqueur back to a boil and Ash adds all the other ingredients, whisking until they foam up like soap suds. Mom shows her how to skim off the bubbles and ladle the jelly through a strainer into the quilted jars. 

And then there it is, her sugary potion. It smells like honey and emulsifies into golden prisms, shot through with rainbows.

Ash carefully sets sealant-coated lids on each jar before twisting the rims into place. Dad pops into the house and gives them a second twist, just to be sure, before they go into the hot water bath to seal. 

“What even is this stuff?” he asks. 

“Poison,” Ash tells him. “Look out!” 

He dances back from the pot as she sets the last jar into place, feeling proud of herself for the bits that she did, and happy that Mom and Dad both put their hands on the project, too. Lightning cracks as the jar settles into place, and Ash jumps back from the stove with a Halloween cackle. 

“Yeah, okay, Sabrina, go find my sewing scraps and pick out some fabrics for toppers.” Mom shoos Ash out of the kitchen. 

Ash picks teal fabric with red and gold flowers on it, to match some of the rainbow she caught in the quilted glass. Dad helps her measure meticulous squares on the back of the fabric, and Mom lets her use the pinking shears to cut them apart and snip little teeth into the edges for decoration. Ash likes the way it adds a little sharpness among all the soft and smooth textures of the project. 

All together, it feels just about right — a little feral, a little jagged, a little sweet, a little stormy. Pretty much like her.

* * *

5. Charge Your Jar

Belle loads up her truck and bounces down the road into town, checking out the back window that she hasn’t lost a basket of pies, checking out the front that she hasn’t lost the slew of crows doing a real weirdness over the Cullinane house. Ash is charging jars, Belle is sure of it, and she needs to be there to settle the kid into it. As any good 4-H leader would do.

She leaves the pies at Harry’s, the greasy spoon off Main, hoping that cigarette smoke and griddled bacon won’t seep into all her crusts before her clients can pick them up. Not that it’d do them real ill, but she takes special care with each pastry shell and she likes folks to taste the herbal undertones: regular-type things like willow bark for Old Man Schlappi’s rheumatoid arthritis; mint to settle Barbara Ann’s stomach; St. John’s wort for Rachel Spinner’s postpartum depression; and raspberry leaf for Henry Stancombe’s menopause. She likes people to taste their trust returned, is all.

After the unload, Belle rolls down to the Cullinanes’ and parks behind their jalopy, grabbing her aluminum town cane from the passenger seat. She doesn’t bother to knock. “Caroline?” 

Caroline twists around and salutes with her coffee mug from the living room floor. She’s got three piles of laundry: two folded, one being unfolded by Patrick. On the TV, Stefano DiMera is crashing a wedding with the bride’s supposed dead ex-lover in tow; Belle doesn’t know, exactly — she prefers General Hospital to Days of Our Lives. 

“She’s in her room with the jars. She won’t stop watching them.”

“What are they doing that’s so interesting?” Belle asks.

“Beats me.”

Belle sidles over to Ash’s bedroom. This time she does knock — ten-year-olds needing their privacy — and the door swings open. 

“Come in,” Ash says, deathly serious. “Behold my jars.”

Belle comes in and beholds. There are jars on the nightstand, the dresser, the window sills. There’s a jar in the stuffed animal hammock in the corner, one lodged into the bookshelf, one on Ash’s desk, and one hanging from the godforsaken light. “What on Earth?”

Ash flings her hands up like a stage magician announcing a trick. “They’re prismatic! The jelly is clear and the glass is quilted and they each hit the light differently depending on where I put them, so I get little rainbows all day.”

Belle looks past the jars, to the things that Ash sees. Sure enough: rainbows, up and down the walls. Belle twists the jar hanging from the light, and it spins colors like the room is a disco roller rink. Outside, the birds send up a cry, and swoop past the window to see whose magic is helping to ground Ash’s.

“Well, I tell you, that’s something.” Belle nods to the largest crow. It caws in acknowledgment and lifts in flight, soothing its flock out of riotous dive-bombing and into a watchful orbit.

“It’s great.” Ash flops back on her bed and picks up her sketchbook. “I’ve been drawing them, too.”

“Can I look?”

Ash hesitates and then hands over the sketchbook. Belle flips through it. Ash’s drawn some of the jars in front of floral patterns, others geometric. Some of them she’s tossed into still life tableaux like some kind of Central Illinois Cézanne, jars positioned among objects from her room: music boxes, baseball bats, dried flowers, books, a globe. Belle glances at the signature — “Ash K. Cullinane” — and schools her face, flips a page in nonchalance. 

That’ll explain the birds.

“Well, looks like you’re guarding them well.” Belle hands the book back and touches the jar on the light again. “And there are hardly any bubbles, which is what those judges love to get you on.”

“Oh, right.” Ash frowns. “I forgot about the judging.”

“That’s for the best; they never like what you think they’ll like. Even without bubbles, they’ll criticize your fabric choice, or say the jelly could have used some food coloring, or mark you down for filling it above some arbitrary line. But let me tell you something, kiddo...” Belle glances back through the open door, lowers her voice, and lifts her cane to punctuate. “It’s. All. Bullshit.”

Ash’s eyes go wide and delighted.

“People make up rules all the time about how things should look, about how things should feel, and then ding you one for making up your own rules, like theirs are the only ones that really count.”

“That happens in school sometimes,” Ash says, sitting forward. “Like when I misinterpret a story or I ask the wrong question. Or when I wear the boys’ uniform vest.”

Belle nods. “This is what I’m saying. There is no single interpretation or wrong question or any actual problem with you wearing a vest. There’s just you seeing what you see, wondering what you wonder, being how you are. Keep it up, okay?”

Ash’s eyes start to pink, holding off tears. Then she rolls off the bed into a crouch and springs forward like a little spider, catching Belle around the midsection. 

Belle blinks at the sudden contact, her eyes widening. Did she ever hug her own mentor? Did her mentor ever hug her? Belle can’t remember. She tightens her arms around Ash. No matter, it can be a new tradition.

After another moment, Ash pulls back and looks up. “Belle? Why do you do 4-H if the rules are bullshit?” 

“Well, someone has to be there to tell the kids like you.” Belle lets her go, a little reluctantly, to be honest. “And I like growing flowers and making quilts and raising animals, just like anyone five hundred years ago would have done. There’s magic in it.”

“Magic,” Ash whispers, and Belle smiles as the birds settle in to roost.

* * *

6. Position Your Jar

Ash selects the most perfect jar among perfection — filled to a quarter inch below the brim, with five tiny petals that escaped the strainer suspended like a constellation in the golden jelly. She holds it in her lap all the way to the fairgrounds, same as David hugs his black box machine. Upon arrival, Mom and Dad take Patrick off to the animals while Ash and David head to their tents: David to engineering and Ash to domestic-engineering. 

On balance, Ash doesn’t super mind that the tent is full of women and girls. Mom calls herself a domestic engineer from time to time when “working” women in dyed silk pumps and skirt suits get superior with her, and if it’s good enough for Mom, it’s good enough for Ash. 

It’s only... the adults start eyeing her immediately, frowning at her yellow bicycle shorts and her glow-in-the-dark Louie the Lightning Bug t-shirt that she wore to charge up in the sunny fairgrounds. Moving their daughters away from her, lest they pose friendship. Marking Ash out as a bad copy instead of an excellent departure. 

She hurries over to her table — remembering what Belle said about judging, jellies and otherwise — and settles her jar in place, turning it so the petals face out. She checks the judging registration Belle sent in for her and fixes her name. As a finishing touch, she plucks one of the wild carrot clusters she stuck into her hairband that morning and places it in front of the jar. 

“Well, I would never let my daughter dress that way,” a voice is saying. Ash glances to the side, giving herself a split second to hope. But no, the woman standing there is definitely looking her up and down. 

“What a tomboy,” says her friend.

Ash’s toes curl in her high-tops, and she touches her project. It feels safe, and powerful, and she hears herself growl, “I’m not a tomboy.”

The women startle, as if they’re used to children being seen and not heard. One puts her hand on her heart over a froth of ruffles. “Then honey, what are you?”

Ash’s color rises and her stomach drops and in between her chest goes hollow, every heartbeat thudding into a great cavernous unknown. She doesn’t have another word to describe herself. Not an all-encompassing one like they want. 

“None of your beeswax!”

She storms out of the tent and doesn’t stop storming until she hits engineering on the other side of the fair. David’s box is sitting on the table next to him, silent and unlit and smoking, while he sucks a lemon shake-up through a barber pole straw. Ash looks between him and his project, shock distracting her from her anger.

“It blew up when I plugged it in,” he says. 

“What?” For some reason, that makes Ash want to cry more than anything else.

“It’s okay.” He shrugs. “Everyone else made model rockets and mousetraps. No soldering at all. Whereas I,” he gestures grandly at his box, “made a mystery.”

“Oh,” Ash says. “Oh.”

A mystery. David made a great, explosive, tensile, wonderful mystery. 

And Ash... well, she is one. 

She leaves David to the BASIC programming manual that has materialized out of his bookbag and wanders back out into the fair in a daze. It’s hitting her that she’s not like the girls in heavy denim skirts, or seas of frills, or tight equestrian ponytails, trying on the womanhood that’s been taught to them. She’s not like the boys in year-round flannel or mechanic’s shirts and boots, dotting the fair like extra tent stakes, rooted, silent, strung so tight they could snap if anyone tested their stoicism. Maybe she doesn’t have an exact word for who she is, but she does have a pulsing question with a million possible answers, just like anyone five hundred years ago would have had. And there’s magic in that.

“I’m me,” she whispers. She takes the rest of the wild carrot out of her hairband and holds it to her lips, her nose, breathing in the wildness. “I’m Ash.”

* * *

7. Activate Your Spell

Belle feels the explosion before she sees it: the domestic-engineering tent going up like a bridge in a Western, with its fluttering linens and coasting gingham and all that beautiful glass haloing the sun.

“Shit,” she says, halfway between horrified and impressed. “Shit.”

She flees the opening dressage event, the thump of her walking stick on the pressed dirt paths helping her clear a way through the stampeding chaos. It also helps that everyone else is looking for things like firehoses, or first aid kits, or their specific wailing child, and she’s looking for a kiddo, oh... about five foot full of herself.

“Ash.”

The child turns, and her face goes from euphoric to sheepish to something Belle can’t quite name. 

“Happens sometimes,” Ash says, her eyes glittering. “The heat.” 

Belle stops in Ash’s aura. It looks a bit like the edge of a rainbow, where things get a little hazy and maybe you’re part of the clear blue sky, or maybe some storm clouds, or some pure burning light.

“I do hope everyone is all right, though,” Ash says, leaning down to scratch the back of her leg. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, I was just... thinking big.”

“We’ll work on that,” Belle says. “And you? You’re okay?”

“Oh yes.” The grin is back, huge and raucous. “I’m pretty sure I’m magical.”

EA Crawley is a writer of fiction and essays, an independent historian, and a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. You can find them at eacrawley.com and on Twitter as @Aloisius_and_I.

Content Notes

The Tree Whisperer

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

The trees are getting restless. I walk down the beaten forest path, trying my best to ignore their murmurs, but they are too many and their words crowd my mind.

The green will perish...

You must warn the people...

Call down the wrath of Ileh...

I do not reply to any of them. They will only slow me down if I do, and I must be back in the village before nightfall. I duck under a low-hanging branch and crawl till I emerge in a clearing. At the far end stands a tall iroko tree, the oldest in the forest and the leader of the trees: Auzyvre, the tree that was planted by Ileh herself.

Kola.

Auzyvre’s voice is deeper than the voices of the other trees, and immediately as they speak, the entire forest falls quiet. They wave their leaves gently, even though there is no wind. Somewhere in their tall branches, a bird sings an ode to the ending day. I incline my head respectfully when I reach their base and a fresh green leaf falls to my feet, a sign of approval and acceptance.

“Auzyvre. I come with news,” I say.

I can feel the other trees tensing, their branches quivering with anticipation. Auzyvre betrays no emotion like the others, but I can tell that they’re expectant as well.

What news do you bring from the world of men?

“Tarim won’t send the foreigners away,” I say.

The trees howl in disappointment. Yellowed leaves fall to the ground all around me. Their branches shake aggressively and I can feel the ground rumbling a little as some of them move their roots, threatening to rip them out of the earth in their anger. 

Enough! Enough!

Auzyvre’s voice cuts through the din, and gradually the trees quiet down. When the last yellow leaf has fallen and the earth has stopped trembling, Auzyvre speaks again.

Kola, you know what will happen if the foreigners do not leave. You know what we must do.

I know. I know what they must do. People will be hurt, or worse. They have done it before, but I cannot let them do it again. The last time the trees acted, innocent people died. This time, if anyone should suffer at all, it should be the ones who have betrayed the earth only. 

“Tarim plans to address all of us tomorrow morning at the village square,” I say. “I will try to persuade him then.”

Good. We thank you, Kola. You are a good man. May Ileh be with you.

I bow. “May Ileh be with you.”

Then I turn and walk out of the clearing, guided back to the village by the birds singing to welcome the night.

* * *

Jimi is waiting for me outside my hut.

He is seated on a bench, dressed in his hunting leathers. His bag of traps lies at his feet, as does his dog Nabi, who raises his head as I approach before returning to his canine dreams. A long knife strapped to Jimi’s slim waist is the only weapon on him. When I draw closer, he gets to his feet and spreads open his arms. I smile and embrace him, inhaling his smell of boiled leather and animal skin and several other wonderful things. He smells like a hunter; I draw a deep breath before pulling away.

“You tarried in the woods,” Jimi says. “I was beginning to worry.”

“The trees were not pleased,” I say as we both sit on the bench. “They want the foreigners gone. Or else...”

A frown creases Jimi’s face. He lays a strong hand over my own.

“Did they hurt you?” he asks.

“No, no,” I say, smiling. 

I try not to glance down at his legs. He hasn’t always been a hunter. For as long as I have known him, Jimi’s dream has been to be a warrior, part of the group of trained men who keep the village safe. He rose through the ranks quickly and caught the eye of Tarim, our leader. Jimi was made a captain of the village’s warriors, and many whispered that someday he could even be the new leader after Tarim.

But all that changed last summer. Jimi was out scouting in the woods and climbed a tree so he could see anyone approaching the village. It was a position he had taken several times; nested in the top branches of a tall tree, he would be hidden from the view of anyone on the ground. But, on that day, he stepped on a weak branch and fell. The other scouts found him and brought him to the apothecary. That was how we met. I nursed him back to health, but the bones in his legs were damaged permanently. He would be able to walk with a limp, but he couldn’t fight anymore. He became a hunter.

“Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry. I just don’t trust the trees.” 

“I understand,” I say.

We sit in companionable silence for a while, listening to the crickets and staring at the stars.

“You will talk to Tarim tomorrow, won’t you?” Jimi asks.

I nod.

“Be careful. You know Tarim. He’s too stubborn.”

I smile and place a hand under his chin, turning his face to me. “You worry too much,” I say.

Jimi opens his mouth to say something else, but I kiss him before he can speak, and whatever words were travelling up his throat turn into moans. His strong callused hands run up under the hem of my shirt and caress my chest. He pinches a nipple, drawing a grunt of pleasure from my lips.

I break the kiss and look into his deep brown eyes.

“You want to come in?” I ask, breathless.

Jimi smiles and stands up, turning toward the door of my hut. He stretches out a hand to me. I take it, and let him pull me to my feet.

* * *

The village square is filled to capacity. Everyone is here, including the hunters and farmers who usually leave the village at first light to check on their traps and farms. The traders are here, the priests, the jobless drunks, everybody.

Jimi stands beside me, gripping my hand tightly. He is dressed in one of my shirts, which is obviously too tight for him. He spent the night at my place and didn’t bring a change of clothes. I try hard not to stare at his bulging muscles as we wait for Tarim’s arrival. If I admire my lover too much, I may be distracted from the task the trees have given to me. 

Tarim’s arrival sends a ripple of apprehension through the crowd, and I immediately see why: Tarim isn’t alone on the podium. Two of the foreigners are with him. They are immediately distinguishable, since they look so different from us. While everyone in my village has brown skin and eyes, the foreigners have hair that looks so pale it is almost bleached white. Their complexion is milky, the direct opposite of ours. Also, their eyes are a glacial blue that immediately made me distrust them the first time I saw them. There is something about their eyes that puts me on guard whenever I’m around any of them.

The foreigners appeared in our village without warning. One day they weren’t here, and then they were. They speak our language with a strange lilting accent. I have heard them conversing in their own tongue before, a nasal language that makes me wonder how they understand each other. 

They have been with us for a full moon, trying to convince Tarim to give them permission to work in the forest. According to them, there is a diamond mine underneath the earth somewhere in the woods. They are promising Tarim a lot of wealth if they are allowed to dig. They have already enticed him with rare and expensive gifts, like the pure white stallion tethered to the front of his hut. I have even heard rumors that one of the female foreigners shares his bed every night. According to the rumormongers, lying with foreigners is different from normal lovemaking. 

This is a meeting for the people of the village. The presence of the foreigners can only mean one thing. I fear that it might be too late to stop Tarim.

“People of Odua Village,” Tarim says, his booming voice reaching every ear in the square. “I have called you here this morning to give you feedback concerning the matters we have discussed before. As you all know, we have visitors  who have come to us from distant lands. They seek something we have in abundance: diamonds. We do not have the means to extract them from the earth, but our visitors do. They promise to make us rich and with that wealth, we shall turn this village into a prosperous town!”

Tarim grins maniacally, and to my dismay I see many people nodding at his words, most of them young men. If the villagers give their final approval, it is done. The mining will begin. And then, the trees would have to do again what they have done only once before...

“This is unacceptable.”

The words come from a wizened old man close to the podium. He is leaning on a stick, dressed in the white garment of the priests. A necklace of cowries hangs from his neck. I recognize him as Oluwo, the oldest man in the village and the chief priest at the shrine of Ileh, goddess of the earth.

“What do you speak of, Baba?” Tarim says, keeping his tone polite, though there is a fierce look in his eyes.

“You cannot desecrate Ileh’s earth this way,” Oluwo says. “The earth gives out of her boundless mercy. Nothing can be wrested from her grasp. To attempt this would be tantamount to self-sabotage.”

Tarim laughs loudly, and a good number of the young men laugh as well. Oluwo doesn’t speak. He just shakes his head in resignation.

“I have something to say.”

My voice surprises even me, but I know this is the right moment to speak up. Jimi squeezes my hand reassuringly, and I squeeze back.

“Well, healer, what do you have to say?” Tarim says, a scowl on his face.

I tell myself to remain calm as I meet his fierce expression. Tarim leads the village with an iron fist and he doesn’t like any form of resistance. I choose my words carefully. 

“Oluwo is right. The forest cannot be defiled.”

“And why is this? Did you see a vision in a bundle of herbs?” he mocks. The sycophants laugh again.

“I have spoken to the trees,” I say, yelling over the noise. “And they are not happy. If this mining is attempted, they will destroy the village once again!”

Tarim raises a hand for silence, and the laughter and chatter die away instantly. He turns his glare on me once more.

“The trees talk?” he says. “We are adult men. Get out of here with that midwives’ tale.”

“It is not a midwives’ tale. It is real.”

Beside me, Jimi steps forward. I look at him incredulously. He is usually quiet in gatherings like this even though I’ve told him countless times that he needs to speak up more.  He is staring at Tarim as if daring him to keep doubting my words.

“Ah, Jimi,” Tarim says. “Don’t tell me you believe this nonsense.”

“I believe it. Kola speaks the truth.”

Jimi’s voice rings through the square. I can see people paying attention; There is an air of authority around him that makes people want to listen to him. 

“We have heard of the earthquakes,” Jimi says. “Our ancestors were too stubborn. They wanted to cut down the forest for the treasures in its depths, but this angered the trees.”

Tarim smirks. “This meeting is adjourned,” he says in his usual dismissive manner. “The mining will begin in three days.”

I watch him leave, followed by the two silent foreigners. The trees will not be pleased.

* * *

The trees are not pleased.

It is night. The gibbous moon looks down on the chaotic forest, illuminating the clearing. I am standing in the midst of a mini-earthquake caused by the trees. I am not sure if the trembling of the earth can be felt back in the village. The trees express their wrath as well as they can, dropping yellowed leaves to the ground and vibrating their roots. I know they must still be employing some restraint, because if they weren’t, I would be buried under the earth by now.

Enough.

Auzyvre’s command cuts through the night like a sword, and there is instant silence. The other trees freeze under the weight of the eldest tree’s will. I can feel the power of Auzyvre’s mind in the sudden stillness. According to what they told me the first time they spoke to me, Auzyvre had been planted by Ileh at the beginning of the world and watered with the goddess’s tears. They had grown in an instant, an immortal tree in the midst of a grove of normal trees. In a way, I suppose Auzyvre is a god as well.

Kola has done nothing to offend us, Auzyvre says to the silent trees. Rather, it is the greedy Tarim and these foreigners we should be angry with.

Until Kola found us, no man could hear our voice. The mark of Ileh is on him. He is her priest. We cannot hurt him.

“I live in the village,” I say. “You cannot save yourselves while refusing to hurt me at the same time. There are people I care about who could get hurt, innocent people who are not on the side of the foreigners. How would you keep them safe as well? ”

Stretch forth your palm.

I obey.

One of Auzyvre’s branches dips, and a broad leaf deposits something into my hand. When I raise it to the bright moonlight, I see that I am holding three red seeds. As a healer, I work with seeds and herbs all the time, but I have never seen this type of seed before. 

Those are parada seeds, given to me by Mother Ileh herself. They are seeds of the deathflower.

“Deathflower?” I hold the seeds at arm’s length and eye them warily.

Fear not. They will not hurt you.

“What am I supposed to do with them?” I ask.

When you return to the village, cast them on the ground and tell them to protect the forest. They will know what to do.

I sigh and close my hands over the seeds. Auzyvre has promised not to destroy the village and I believe their words. But what if these seeds translate my words wrongly and protect the forest by destroying the village? 

Auzyvre must have read the doubt on my face. 

Fear not. You shall not be harmed. The deathflower seeds have the will of the earth. They shall follow whatever purpose your heart desires.

“All right,” I say. “May Ileh be with you.”

May Ileh be with you.

* * *

The village sleeps.

I take a deep breath as I look out at the darkened huts. There may be no going back from this. I do not know what the deathflower seeds will do, but I know the trees won’t hurt anyone that doesn’t deserve it. Also, Auzyvre said these seeds are from Ileh herself. The earth would never hurt her own children, not unless they betray her first.

I toss the seeds to the ground.

“Protect the village,” I say.

At once, the seeds grow before my eyes — not into trees but into monsters. 

The three things standing before me are vaguely humanoid, but where they should have legs, instead they have roots. Their hands end in sharpened points for each finger and their heads... they aren’t there at all. When I look upward, all I see is darkness; clouds of formless darkness that turn to glare at me, even though they have no eyes that I can see.

Ileh’s servant. We shall obey you.

I blink and they are gone, melted into the night.

* * *

Jimi’s excited voice wakes me from sleep. “You have to see this!”

I open my eyes and look up at him. He is fully dressed, with awe and fear in his eyes. 

“What happened?” I ask.

“Come!” he says again before leaving the hut. I rise from the bed and follow at a slower pace. 

Outside, there is nothing but chaos. People run around, all in different stages of undress. I frown and look around. Some people are obviously packing. I do not see any of the foreigners. 

“Hey, what happened?” I ask Jimi.

“Tarim... the foreigners...” he says.

I think about the seeds and the monsters that sprang from them. “What happened to them?”

“They are all missing. Nothing left, except...”

I wait for him to continue.

“I think you should see for yourself,” he says. 

I follow him through the chaos until we reach Tarim’s hut. At the entrance, I see the first heap of leaves. They are dry and yellow, sucked of life. A chill runs down my spine as I realize that this heap was once a man. There are more leaves inside the hut but no people. 

“Is it like this in the tents of the foreigners as well?” I ask. 

“Yes, my love. Nothing but leaves, leaves everywhere. Dry and yellowed.”

I nod.

“You seem quite relaxed,” Jimi says. “Was this your doing?”

“Hardly. It was the trees. I am just the messenger.”

My lover stares at me. I grin and tap his cheek.

“The people are scared and confused,” I say. “They will need a leader, someone to bring order out of all this. I think you should address them.”

“But what will I say?”

“That’s left to you,” I say. “Just don’t tell them your very handsome boyfriend let a trio of tree monsters loose to eat Tarim and the foreigners.” 

Jimi chuckles and kisses me. I kiss him back, trying to keep him from noticing the uncertainty on my face.

“Go,” I whisper.

I watch him walk toward the podium at the center of the village and I feel a sudden wave of pride. I do not fully understand what happened to Tarim and his friends, but the trees are safe. The village is safe.

I take a deep breath and turn toward the forest. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but I think I see Auzyvre’s branches waving at me from the magical clearing. It shouldn’t be possible to see the clearing from this distance, but Auzyvre is a god-tree, so they must have opened my third eye somehow. I smile and wave back. Out of nowhere, a fresh green leaf falls to my feet. I pick it up and turn to follow my lover to the village square, and to a new chapter of our lives.

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry from Nigeria. When he’s not writing about crazy robots or fallen gods, he can be found reluctantly completing a degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Lagos. His works have been published in Fantasy Magazine, Baffling Magazine, and elsewhere. He tweets music lyrics and unfinished thoughts @OluwaSigma.

Content Notes

what the water gave

Cynthia Zhang

The painter comes on Mondays.

“My day off,” she says when Mara finally asks, her smile warm in the way of a woman who has not always been welcomed warmly. Her hands are not a painter’s hands, almond-brown and roughly scarred in the wrong places, and she is un-Touched, with no hint of Gift or dryad blood strumming through her veins. Extraordinarily unextraordinary, Mara’s mother would have said, and smiled at her own cleverness. Once upon a time, younger and arrogant in the way of youth, Mara might have agreed. 

But here, standing on the lighthouse observation deck as she watches a distant figure touch brush to canvas in the chill air of morning, Mara is witch enough to recognize another type of magic at work.

“So,” Thomas says, sidling up next to Mara as she leans against the banister, two mugs of fresh coffee in his hands. “Have you gotten her name yet?”

Mara sips at the coffee, mug warm between her hands. Below them, the painter stands on the edge of the old cliffs, a lone figure and her canvas silhouetted against a gray sky. It is too far from the lighthouse to make out the exact expression on her face, but Mara can imagine it well enough — the subtle frown, the furrow between her eyes as she studies the play of paint on canvas.

“Well,” Thomas says. “Don’t take too long, now.”

* * *

Thomas comes from town at precisely six, the way he always does. Technically a lightkeeper’s hours vary depending on the season and amount of sunlight, but Thomas is a creature of habit; he likes his schedules and routines, the neatly patterned shape of familiar days. They are alike in that, even if Mara’s routines are more organic, tied to the tides and skies rather than mechanical time.

“Got you a new one,” he says, pulling out a thin manila folder from his battered satchel. “New family, moved here a couple of months back. Don’t think you’ve met them, but they’re looking for their daughter.”

Mara takes the folder. From the pages, a young girl’s face stares out at her: Sara Rodriguez, twelve years old and curly-haired, with dark eyes too large and solemn for her small frame. According to ABC News, she was last seen on a Girl Scouts trip telling her friends to go back to camp as she inspected a tree stump. “We thought she wanted to count the rings, or maybe collect some leaves,” said fifteen-year-old Alison Bradford, a round, freckled face peering out of the news photos. “It’s what we’re supposed to do on these trips — explore nature, engage with the outdoors. We didn’t think she was actually going to go anywhere.”  The Scout coordinator called the rangers when Sara didn’t show up by evening, but after two days of canvassing the mountain, they’ve found nothing. 

There’s a photo of the area where Sara was last seen paperclipped together with Amber Alerts and the flyers her parents have put up around town. It’s an ordinary enough clearing — young cedars, bright sunlight, a clearly marked dirt trail, and a small sign warning visitors not to feed the wildlife. Moss climbs the sides of the stump, and a ring of small white mushrooms grows around it. If not for the thickness of the stump, nearly twice as wide as the trunks of the trees around it, the picture would be indistinguishable from any other photo of a state park. A perfect spot for families to picnic or couples to while away a warm afternoon. 

Mara looks up. “Did the parents tell you all of this, or did you collect it yourself?”

“They were talking about it at the bar. The rest was easy enough to find, once I knew what to Google.”

She nods, flipping to the next page. The people of Ashville are friendly, but it is still a small town and Thomas has been here far longer than Mara has. Mothers smile at her in the street, but they also hold their bags a little tighter, keep their children a little closer. She understands this, even as it stings. Unlike Thomas, who makes a minimal effort at sociability, Mara has lived near Ashville for years without attending its baseball games or talking to grocery store clerks beyond saying “hello” and “thank you.” 

It is for the best — a witch watches and waits, and Mara knows she discomfits people with the way she studies them and her preference for silence over conversation. Since the first wives plucked herbs to ease birthing pains, heartsick lovers and desperate mothers have come to witches for traveling sweethearts and ailing children, farmers have sought their aid during lambing season and poor harvests. But a witch’s place has always been on the periphery — close to but never quite a part of the people she watches over.

(“Oh, darling,” her mother sighs in her mind, mouth a delicate moue of distaste, “if that’s true, why even bother with people at all?” No longer a lonely, sheltered teenager,  Mara has a dozen answers on the tip of her tongue, but she forces them down. Even within the confines of her own imagination, her mother has never been much for listening.) 

Thomas’s gaze is sharp, too knowing as he watches her flip through the rest of the information. Over the years, he has seen her talk down raging waves and speed the knitting of broken bones, ward off crop blight and ease away mercenary developers with dreams of transforming Ashville into condos and beach homes. Mara has helped lost pets and drunk lovers home, but that was when home was a mere few miles away.

In theory, she knows she can do it. Once upon a time, when she was still living in Baltimore with all the accumulated power of her mother’s coven, it would have been a mere trifle to locate one lost girl. But her mother is on the other side of the state, and Mara has no intention of bridging that divide now.

“Coffee?” Thomas asks. “Or whiskey?”

“Coffee, hold the whiskey, please,” she says, starting up the stairs toward the observation deck. “I’ll be up for a while, I think.”

* * *

In the morning, an hour or so before dawn, Mara goes down to the shore. It is quiet, the only other living presence the gulls, and those know her well enough by now to no longer bother looking up from their exploration. Like Thomas, the land was wary of her at first, this strange city girl combing its shores for driftwood and drying starfish, skin the same pale shade as that of the men who had driven out the place’s original guardians. Trust, like flowers after a frost, came precariously, with time and care. 

Toes digging into the sand, Mara lets the waves wash over her ankles as the shore offers its bounty: bottle caps, sea glass hazy shades of green and blue, long tangled tresses of seaweed, and pale seashells the size of fingernails. The starfish she scoops back into the sea, away from the hot sun; the bits of bone and broken turtle shell she lays aside to grind into powder for poultices and luck potions. The cracked beer bottles and plastic wrappers go into the trash, spelled with a quick cantrip to expediate their decomposition into clean earth; the plastic bottles and dented soda cans she takes home, to be washed and given to the recycling center the next time she goes into town.

When she has finished sorting through what the ocean has given, she lays out her own offering. Divination is a traditionally fussy affair, but over years of willing hermitage, Mara has pared the process down to the essentials. For Sara Rodriguez, Mara brings old things and sea-sharpness: a wreath of salt-stiff seaweed; mussel shells; the sun-bleached skull of a turtle; and a handful of mackerel bones, the small, sharp kind that catch in unsuspecting throats. I return these things to you, to return what has been taken from here. 

She sets the bones afloat. They drift toward the horizon and, one by gleaming one, sink slowly into the water.

Tomorrow morning, she will return and study the pattern of flotsam and human trash on the sand. What the water gives may be garbled or cryptic or not at all relevant, an answer to a question asked months ago or a year in the future, but it will be the truth. 

Until then, there is always work to do.

* * *

The painter — Theodora, technically, but call me Theo — works in Philadelphia an hour and a half’s drive away. She is tall, broad-shouldered in a way that speaks to years of sweat and effort, and she wears her hard-earned mechanic’s muscle with turquoise jewelry, bright headscarves, loose long dresses, and no makeup. She likes ‘70s rock and bad puns, the more obnoxious the better, eyes crinkling with amusement every time Mara scrunches her nose in faux disgust. 

“I was driving,” Theo says when Mara asks how she stumbled on Mara’s spit of scrub and sand and gunmetal water. “I do that sometimes — just drive around for hours, going down back roads with the GPS off and the window open, if it’s warm enough. It’s terrible for the environment, I know, and I ride the trains when I’m in Philly, but there are some places you can’t really get to without your own transportation.” Theo smiles, so bright with sincerity Mara has to look away. “Here, for example.” 

Theo has a face that invites confidences, but Mara knows the importance of holding truths close, no matter how much she wants to spill out her secrets like waves breaking on shore.

They do not talk much while Theo works. Sometimes Theo will stand back, turning to Mara with a question about a particular shade of sky or slant of light on water, but for the most part it’s a silent process, the only sounds those of the birds and the surf and the soft swish of paint across canvas. Mara leaves occasionally to check on her spells or to water her garden, and when she looks up from straightening the trellises for flowering cucumber vines and snap peas, Theo is still there, a tall, dark woman standing on the cliffs and frowning at the rocks below.

Eventually, dusk will come in its slow and certain way. Theo wraps cloth over her canvas and dismantles her easel, carefully placing both in the back seat of her sensible gray sedan. Brushes packed up and tucked under one arm as she stands in front of the car, Theo will smile at Mara, watercolor-soft in the low light.

“I’ll see you next week, then?”

Yes, Mara wants to say, the words every time pushing at her throat, yes, always, anytime as long as you’ll have me, but in the end, she only nods.

* * *

“Does she know?” Thomas asks one blustery, cool day as they sit in her garden, a battered teapot and a checkers board between them. Around them, young cucumber and tomato plants grow ramshackle over their trellises, yellow flowers reaching toward the sun.

“Know what?”

“You know what I mean.” Thomas pours out tea, sliding a mug over to Mara. “You can’t keep it from her forever.”

“Technically, I can and have. You’re an anomaly — you don’t count.”

Thomas sips his tea. “I feel like I should be offended by that, somehow.” 

Mara shrugs. “If you want to be.”

In more than one way, Thomas is an outlier in her life: the first man she’s slept with, her first friend outside her mother’s circle, the first and only un-Touched person to know about her magic. The last was less a deliberate choice than a gradual revelation, creeping in as nights of strong tea and shared silences slowly grew into something more intimate. After months of spelling away his hangovers and coaxing her tomatoes into ripening early, it simply seemed redundant to keep up the façade. In all their time together, Thomas has never pried, never asked for more than she was willing to give just as Mara has never asked about the silver band he still wears or the photos he keeps in his bedroom drawer. This is another way they know each other, another way they fit together.

Mara stirs sugar into her tea, leapfrog capturing three of Thomas’s pieces in a move that makes him curse with the fluency of an old sailor. 

“You know why I don’t tell,” she says, stacking the pieces into a small tower beside her mug. “Bad family history there, letting people know. Nothing but angry mobs and public hangings down that road.” 

“In the seventeenth century, sure. Does Theo really strike you as a pitchforks and torches type?” 

“Maybe not.” Mara picks up a checker, turning it over in her fingers. She focuses on the coolness of the piece against her skin, the raised ridges where Thomas carved whorls into the wood. “But it’s still a risk. They still hurt people for what I do. They hurt people for a lot less in this country.” 

“They do,” Thomas agrees, capturing Mara’s newly-placed checker. “But are you sure that’s what you’re afraid of, and not something else?” 

Mara lifts the mug to her lips, studiously focusing on the taste of bergamot and bittersweet black tea. Thomas sighs — a quiet noise, but one Mara catches nonetheless.

The problem is that Thomas isn’t wrong, strictly speaking. Relationships with those outside the Craft are not uncommon, even if Mara’s mother distinctly did not approve of them. Mara knows in theory that her situation is one that other people have experienced and successfully navigated. 

But there is still a knot of unease sitting heavy and dark in the pit of her stomach, a quiet voice that whispers what if? Beyond the banal questions of physical safety, what if she is simply reading too much into Theo’s short hair and strong arms and the tattoo of violets on her wrist? And if Theo likes women — even if Theo likes her — between the magic and the odd arrangement with Thomas and her own oddness, what if Mara is simply one complication too many to handle?

Thomas — Thomas took the revelation of her magic in stride, but he’s Thomas: steady as tides in morning, a man who reacted to a stranger setting up home in an abandoned cottage with a raised eyebrow and an invitation for tea. With Theo there are simply too many unknowns, too many variables outside of her control: the two-hour drive from Philadelphia, the sparks of lightning when fingers brush over mugs of tea, the involuntary stutter-stop of Mara’s heart at the sight of a faded blue truck on the horizon. Better not to make any sudden moves and stay content with what she has than risk losing it altogether. 

“How is the search going, by the way?” Thomas asks, letting the subject drop. “Learned anything about where the girl might be?”

“Not yet. I only asked a week ago, though.” The ocean is old and its time is not human time, a year as fleeting to it as a day to Thomas or Theo. But Mara has worked hard, tended every oil-slick sick bird and plastic-tangled turtle the waters bring her, diligently dug up invasive shoots of pampas and planted native grasses in their wake. The ocean knows her, and it will give its answers in its own time.

They drink their tea, the only sounds the spray of the waves and the click-clack of checkers on wood. 

* * *

“I started in high school, actually,” Theo says, tucking a lock of hair behind one ear. She’s brought food with her this time, bread and cheese and a bottle of cheap sweet wine they pass back and forth like teenagers. “I lived in a small town, one of those where we had just enough people for a movie theater and the nearest Walmart was an hour away. There was the youth group at church and the football team at school, and if you weren’t interested in those, it was either sitting at home or the school library. Which I didn’t mind, but there are only so many times you can read Anne of Green Gables. Sometimes you need to just see or do something else for a change of scenery.”

 “Where did you go, on these trips?” Mara asks, spreading a thick layer of sun-warmed brie over her half of baguette. It’s good bread, crackling soft and yeasty in the way store-bought can only try to imitate. Mara will have to make jam soon, to thank her for it.

“Oh, anywhere, really.” Theo waves a hand. “I might have crossed state borders a few times, but I was a good kid — always got back in time for school, even if I’d been driving all night. There’s something peaceful about driving down the interstate at four a.m. when it’s just you and the long-haul truckers. If you get far out enough, there are places you can pick out the constellations as easy as points on a map.” 

Mara imagines it: Theo, age seventeen, pulling her truck to the side of a midnight-dark road to gaze at the stars. Already broad-shouldered and long-limbed yet coltish still, a teenager not yet grown into the fullness of her adult shape. 

“You could come along sometime, you know.” When Mara looks up, Theo is watching her, a small smile tucked into the crook of her mouth. “We could do a road trip of sorts — a small one, I mean, just around these parts. You’d be surprised at the types of things you find once you start looking — I saw chicken of the woods at a highway rest stop once, growing just a few feet away from where the drivers let out their dogs. The truck’s not the newest, but she’s held up well and there’s plenty of room in the passenger’s seat.”

Mara considers the offer. A witch and her demesne are bound, but it is not a constricting relationship — cannot be, for then that would be not stewardship but servitude. There’s been no real reason for her to go beyond the village for a while, nothing she wanted she could not get at the local grocery store or through the internet, but perhaps it’s different now. 

“I’d like that,” Mara begins, and she means it, she does. But there are all the old questions to consider, and new ones too — gardening instructions to leave for Thomas, charms to hang on the doorways for protection, spells to weave to keep the seagulls from pecking at plastic wrap and cigarette butts. The sands are shifting, the currents eddying in a pattern she has not yet learned how to read, and Mara, whose life has been a neat pattern of old routines and grounding ritual, does not know where she will land. It’s new and thrilling, this feeling of standing in front of a future she cannot predict, but a part of Mara still clings to order, resisting the idea of surrendering herself to the crashing waves of fate. “I just —”

“One day, then.” Somehow, without any sorcery or divination, Theo seems to understand all the words Mara cannot speak, and if there is not magic at work in that then Mara is no witch worthy of the name.

* * *

There is a shift in the air when Mara walks down to the shore the next morning, a quiet whisper that buzzes beneath her skin: the waters have heard, and the waters have answered. As the tides gently splash against her ankles, Mara crouches down, letting the ocean’s whispers surround her as she studies the sand. In the splay of seashells and bottle caps, she reads the story of Sara Rodriguez: an only child, beloved and protected in the way of those born to parents who had long stopped hoping for children at all. A bit too outspoken and odd to be truly popular, but always friendly, with an intensity that produced fierce loyalty in the friends she did have. The kind of bright kid who preferred dragons to romance, daydreaming to grades. 

There is fear, but also something else, a bright note standing out from the acrid background of anxiety and confusion. Despite everything, there is a part of Sara that is excited, almost giddy, at the thought of never returning. 

Mara reads the signs once, twice to be sure. Water drips from her skirt as she stands up, a trail of saltwater and footprints following her as the waves wash the message back into the water.

There are monsters in the woods, talking wolves and pale white bears spun from mist and hollow-eyed creatures warped cruel by years of pollution and human predation, but they are not the only entities there. Slumbering forest gods, older than empire; long-limbed spirits with fingers of fog and ether, adhering to no law but that of the seasons themselves; smiling old women who may hunger for soft child flesh but will at least feed them first, keep them on if they prove themselves clever or useful enough. The woods are full of monsters, but all shadows can be monsters, given the right light. And Mara knows, too, the call of the forest — the desire, when the world weighs too heavy on human shoulders, to keep walking. Never looking back, simply letting the clean line of trees close behind like the doors of a childhood bedroom.

Sara Rodriguez may be in danger or she may not be, may have gotten lost by accident or by choice. From Thomas’s gossip and her own spies, sly flies and soft-winged moths who lurk all day in larders and bars before creeping in to report at sunset, Mara knows that Sara’s relationship with her parents is complicated — not loveless, but complicated in the way all love is when you are twelve-almost-thirteen. Products of another culture in a country still wary of claiming them as its own, Rosa and Esteban Rodriguez love their daughter. That does not mean they understand her, this American child with her love for Tolkien and too much black in her closet, but they are trying. That, Mara knows from long experience, can count for so much more than it would appear.

So for Sara Rodriguez, Mara sends out her bravest troops, quick-legged spiders and clever mice who know the best ways to sneak crumbs and trinkets past crackling kitchen oil and purring housecats. By late afternoon, she has everything she needs; by dusk, she is kneeling on the shore again, winding together the strings of a spell to call Sara Rodriguez home. 

The clasp of a long-forgotten handbag is attached to a phone charm; a scrunchie bundles together colored pencils and Pokémon cards and a bent skull ring, a small bouquet of things worn and loved and lost. A broken pair of headphones received for some birthday long past; the edge of a sugar skull, left over from last October; a piece of tamarind candy, the brand Sara’s mother drives to the next town over to buy. Moss anchors the spell in luck, purple comfrey flowers woven throughout for safe travels. This is you, Mara thinks, twisting flowers out of lace and faded notebook paper. These are the pieces of the world you loved and left once, the small joys waiting for you when you return.

Lastly, Mara lays her offerings: dandelion tea, homemade jam, and a charm woven from reeds and sea glass. Another home, if Sara should want it, if she should need it. 

She hopes it will be enough. But even if it is not — well, she thinks as she walks out of the water, a single figure against the hushed line of sea and sky and night, perhaps even then it will not be quite a tragedy.

* * *

A year or so after she first moved to Ashville, Mara went back to Baltimore.

There was no force summoning her, no whisper of pitchforks or small-town suspicion driving her back to familiar terrain. A year on, and though the land was still not quite friendly, it had begun to tentatively trust her, giving clearer answers with the tides. The tomatoes in her garden were ripening, fat and pale yellow-green.

But Mara had lived in Baltimore for twenty-six years, slept in the same chilly third-story bedroom and read leather-bound grimoires beneath the sharp gazes of Thoth and Hermes before Ashville and Thomas and the sea. It had not always been happy, but it had still been the first twenty-six years of her life; the city was in her, a solid weight claiming her in the way only land can. For all the sour associations Baltimore’s coffee shops and skyline now held, it was impossible not to miss them. 

So one day in early May, with an offering left at the shore and chains of rosemary and basil hung to keep her house safe, Mara packed her clothes into her backpack, biked into town, and boarded a bus to Baltimore. The youth hostel she checked into was situated above a bar, but the location was good and the front desk staff graciously offered free earplugs. In the morning, after a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee and an apple in her purse for later, Mara took the train to her mother’s house. 

She did not bother with glamour; without makeup or jewelry, there was little chance her mother’s friends would recognize her. Perhaps they would find signs of her afterwards in the traces of an aura or the shifting of the ley lines announcing another witch in her mother’s domain, but Mara did not intend to stay that long.

A pricked thumb and a drop of blood to appease the land, and there it was: a tall black townhouse springing up between other tall black houses. Witches’ Row, though glamour and secrecy meant few knew it by that name. To the tourists and non-magical locals, it was merely a curiosity, an odd sprouting of Gothic architecture in the middle of Locust Point. Something to photograph for Instagram, nothing more.

Sitting on a bench with an iced coffee and a ragged paperback as cover, Mara could make out little of what was happening in her mother’s house: occasional flashes of jewelry through the window or snatches of voices carried into the street, but nothing of who they belonged to. Her mother must have been hosting brunch to have company over at this time of the day — always a more casual affair than dinner parties, but no less ritualistic for all that, no less a parade of socialites and city council members whose magical ambition ended at the limits of their own comfort. All from old, wealthy families come to flaunt their wealth and power amidst equally glittering kin.

Mara’s family was from Essex originally, descendants of an old witching line driven to migration by the impending Civil War and fanatic young men proclaiming themselves witchfinder generals. They caught few real witches, mostly wives with sharp tongues or old women with more knowledge of plants than most, but Mara’s family had not survived the centuries without a keen sense for danger. 

As Matthew Hopkins rode from town to town charging money for murder and the Roundheads and Cavaliers loaded their rifles against each other, Mara’s ancestors packed their bags and grimoires for Lord Baltimore’s New World venture, where witches might not be welcome but Papists and Protestants could still pass each other in the street and expect a civil greeting. Setting up home on the muddy banks of Chesapeake Bay, they coaxed fat tomatoes and jewel-toned sweet corn from the land and traded with the Piscataway tribes for fresh meat and knowledge of the local herbs. Hares and sleek-furred otters fled into their traps; cleverer animals, capable of taking human shape, found their way into warm feather beds and so strengthened subsequent generations with shifter blood. 

Their luck only increased over the years, as Maryland transformed from province to state and Baltimore from settlement to city proper. Neighbors died, pledging their lives to God or abolition or the Confederacy; governments rose, fell to rebellion, then rose again; skies grew gray with smoke and the waters of the bay muddy with sludge as the fish died in droves; but Mara’s family survived. Generations of witches thrived, singing the fat from the land and growing rich on its bounty, gradually forgetting the importance of thanking the earth and repaying what is given. 

On a bright spring morning, in a gentrified neighborhood of a city built on stolen land, Mara sat outside the house she had once lived in and watched figures moving inside. She stayed there, spine straight and gaze unwavering, until all the ice in her coffee had melted, and she had to squint her eyes against the glare of the midday sun. 

Then she stood up, packed the paperback into her backpack, finished her coffee, and walked to the nearest café for a panini and the blessed chill of air conditioning. There was an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art and, if she was lucky, there would be time to stop by Book Escape afterwards. She was running low on reading material.

The next morning, Mara bought a lobster roll the size of her head and walked through Inner Harbor, breaking off pieces of bread for the gulls as she turned discarded snack wrappers around her into compost for the clover growing through sidewalk cracks. And then, with two boxes of Berger cookies stuffed into her backpack, a new selection of Agatha Christie paperbacks, and a baseball hat with a dancing crab for Thomas, she took the bus back home to Ashville.

* * *

Thomas is early. Mara sees his car outside the lighthouse, but deep in the middle of kneeling in the dirt and hammering in wooden stakes for the summer squash, she does not head to the keeper’s quarters until sunset signals the end of her shift. 

There’s an open bottle of Merlot in the kitchen, and Thomas greets her with a raised glass and a rare smile. 

“You’re chipper today,” Mara says, toeing off her sandals for house slippers. “A good run at poker, or did June Everett finally break it off with Nathaniel Williams like she should have six months ago?”

Thomas snorts. “You give that girl far more credit than she deserves. Me as well, at least when it comes to betting. Come here.” He pats a spot on the couch next to him. “There’s something you should see.”

Curious, she joins him. 

“Look,” Thomas says, tilting his phone toward her. It’s open to a news site, and as Mara leans over, the video begins playing. She has to squint at the tiny figures on Thomas’s old phone, but she recognizes her almost immediately: Sara Rodriguez, small between the park rangers walking on either side. A news anchor’s voice floats over the footage: after three weeks of searching, a local hiker — efforts of friends and family — a truly astonishing stroke of luck — 

Sara Rodriguez is scratched and sunburnt, dehydrated and exhausted, but she is alive and she is safe.

“Good work,” Thomas says, raising a glass. They drink, the wine settling somewhere warm and familiar in Mara’s stomach. Sitting here together, with a bottle of good wine and the fruit of their labor on the screen before them, she thinks she could bottle up this moment and live off it for years to come.

This time, she is the one who kisses him, but Thomas has always had quick reflexes. Soon they are lost in each other, the Merlot long forgotten. 

* * *

After Thomas has driven back to town for errands and Mara has left an apology on the shore for sleeping into the afternoon, when the soreness of her muscles has receded into a pleasant ache and her head no longer rings from the wine, Mara makes her way to the cliffs.

And there — like clockwork, like magic — is Theo. A lone poplar rising over purple wildflowers and low scrubs, she stands with a paintbrush between her teeth as she studies her canvas: not a landscape this time but a study of the lighthouse, its faded red stripes and black cupola, the slightly crooked lightning rod and the shadow of the great light within. On the gallery, two figures lean against the metal railing, bare silhouettes against the looming shape of the tower. Two figures, and on the cliff overlooking it all, a third — watching them as surely they watch her and just a little unsure for it, a little uncertain about her welcome. 

Mara almost wants to leave, to slip away and let this moment rest here, Theo and her canvas, the sky enveloping all of them.

But.

It is a bright, crisp day, and, not too far from here, a small girl is finally sleeping in her bed. It is not much, but it is enough to make Mara a little braver.

“Theo?” she says, voice soft. 

“Mara!” Theo’s smile is like the sunrise, slowly lighting up every inch of her face. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. How are you?”

“Busy. Good busy, though.”

“Good busy’s always better than the alternative,” Theo says, placing her palette down beside her notebooks. There’s a streak of paint across her nose, bright green on freckled brown skin. “Not too busy for me, I hope.”

“No,” Mara says, stepping forward. Very slowly, careful to broadcast every movement, she lifts Theo’s hands to her lips. Her kiss is feather-soft, the slightest beat of albatross wings against skin, eyes never leaving Theo’s face. “Never too busy for you.”

In the purpling light, Theo’s eyes are the color of sun through leaves, a shifting green-gold staring up at her in astonishment.

“Stay awhile,” Mara says, and Theo — 

Theo, she does. 

* * *

Mara kneels at the shoreline, watching the waves come and go. 

Not yet dawn, no gulls crying and no crabs scuttering along the shore, the sand still cold under her bare feet. Later the sun will rise and the stillness of this moment will slowly shift into all the million tasks of the day — shoreline to sweep and scour, wards to examine and strengthen, all the small things a witch does to care for her land. For now, though, all of that is yet to come; for now, it is just her and the ocean and the pale sky above.

She holds a gift in her hands, a small toy boat fashioned from reeds and driftwood. She sets it on the water, watching it sway back and forth for a few seconds before reaching into her pocket again. The match lights with the first strike, the boat bobbing a little lower as she places a tea candle atop it, but it soon rights itself. Another moment, to make sure the boat is as steady as it can be, and then she gives it a small nudge forward — not too hard, with just enough magic to make sure it stays afloat, no water soaking through the paper deck and sails.

Her dress dipping in the ocean, she watches her small offering of paper and burning wax drift away.

Tonight, she will go home and burn sage and amaranth, letting the smoke rise through the space of her small cottage into the night air. Later — tomorrow, perhaps, if she has time — she will visit the woods next to the highway and offer her worship in the form of pruning sick branches and stitching together broken bark before collecting the forest’s gifts in the midnight moonlight. Because she is Ashville’s witch, she will cast a handful of holly leaves in each direction and lay oak twigs in the shape of the ley lines, protection from speeding cars for the deer and possums. 

The rest she will take home with her, ash twigs to be cut and twined with fennel and bay and then hung in the rafters, the windowsills, the doorway where Theo kissed her so sweetly before driving back to her Philly apartment. Once the landlord finishes repainting the kitchen, Theo has promised she’ll let Mara visit.

Mara has never kept much in the way of excess, a bare minimum of cutlery in the drawer and a total of three chipped plates in the cabinet. Remembering Theo walking through her house, the walls empty but for bunches of dried herbs, she thinks she might want to start. Perhaps Theo, with her love of color and her artist’s eye, could help.

Cynthia Zhang is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kaleidotrope, On Spec, Phantom Drift, and other venues. After the Dragons, her debut novel, was released in August 2021 by Stelliform Press. She is tragically online and can be found @cz_writes on Twitter.

Content Notes

To Build a Garden

C.B. Blanchard

Fennel and Sky lived outside the walls, and they were as happy as they could be there. It wasn’t always easy, living in the flood and the ruins, and they had to do a lot to make sure they didn’t sleep with empty bellies. Even when they did, they slept curled up in animal comfort together and made it better.

Happiness, Sky thought, was something you built, not something you took in like breath.

Spring was on the way. She could tell from the snowdrops, which she loved. Every year she loved them. Delicate white bells on juicy green stems, poking through dull hard soil or above snow,  winking out over frost. A promise that the hard times were passing and life was starting again. She picked a bunch for Fennel, who loved them too.

Sky hadn’t been in this part of the ruins before. Normally Fennel went with her, but today Fennel had taken their spear and boat to get winter fish near where the skyscrapers crumbled into the floodwaters. Fish tonight, baked on the embers of their fire, with some of the bitter greens that grew in the cracks of the buildings and made them feel strong, made them feel good.

Sky was thinking of this, of winter fish and bitter greens, of food and of love. Of baked fish, skin crisp, oil on her mouth, and slightly burned fingers. Sky was thinking of how Fennel might kiss the burns, might kiss the grease off her mouth. This was why she almost walked right past it: a half-sunken building with a tree reaching up through the roof to the chill blue sky.

Fennel could read the old language because they’d grown up behind the wall, but they hadn’t been wanted there and they didn’t talk about it. Sky couldn’t read, but she knew pictures. There were faded pictures here, done on the plastic that humans used to have. Once bright, now faded to shades of misty blues and greens. They were clear, though: pictures of plants, vegetables. Maybe there was food inside.

She pushed through the weeds, the pooled water, the leaf mulch on the floor, and laid the snowdrops on the counter. Tree roots sank through the cracks in the floor, and birds called out in alarm from the tree above her. Light played through its branches, casting shadows over the decaying shop.

What she found in there was better than food.

It was seeds. Seed packets. Fruits and vegetables and everything else.

She filled her pack with every undamaged packet she could find. Fennel would be able to read them, and tell her how to use them. They could grow a garden.

Sky almost forgot the snowdrops. She went back for them, and left with the stalks held tightly in her fist.

* * *

It had been a surprise to Fennel that there were people out here. Behind the wall they told you there was nothing in the ruins, nothing in the land, that inside the walls was all there was. Fennel said to Sky that they would threaten to throw you out if you did wrong, if you were bad, if you didn’t fit. They said you would die, alone, with no one around you. Fennel didn’t know if they knew people like Sky were out here. Fennel didn’t think it mattered to them.

 Sky had grown up out here — her mother had been smart and quick and good at teaching. You could live in the ruins very well, if you had to. There was other land, far away, with no ruins or flooding and all the plants you could need. It was a story her mother had told her. But the city stopped people from getting to it. It was built all the way across the little spit of land. From edge to edge, it ate it all up. On the other side of Sky’s home, an immense lake flooded what had once been a great and beautiful city. The people who lived there had been able to eat whatever and whenever they wanted, and sit in warm homes and just do nothing. Between the dead city and the living, this scrap of ruin, of land and shore, this was what they had. It was home to quite a lot of people, though they liked to live apart from each other to make their own survival in what was left to them. Sky sometimes thought that being too close to each other scared people out here, that they were too used to taking care of themselves. There were bad people, sometimes, but things had a way of happening to them.

One day, after Sky was grown, her mother had taken a boat and gone to see what was on the other side of the flood. Either she’d died or found wonders because she hadn’t come back yet. Shortly after, the people behind the wall opened the big metal gate and shoved Fennel out into the ruins, and they found each other. Three winters ago now.

She hadn’t been lonely before. Alone, often, but never lonely. She could go to the tower where Noelle and Moss lived with their two children, or she could go to the hut on the shore where Danae carved things from driftwood, or she could go to a lot of other places where people would be nice to her. She knew ten people to be friends with, not including Fennel, and she could recognise more who sometimes came to her with things to trade or help to offer. But there was a difference between that and someone who loved you entire, who wiped the dirt off your face one day and then kissed you for the first time shakily, like it might kill them, and who wept when you went to bed together. It was different.

Fennel didn’t like to be alone. It must be hard to go from having so many people around to having so few. Even if the people behind the wall hadn’t loved Fennel, hadn’t understood them, hadn’t wanted them — there had been a lot of people. Maybe a few thousand, Fennel said. But these things had come out in trickles over the years, mainly in the dark, because it hurt Fennel to talk about it.

Sky didn’t know if anyone else out here was from inside the wall. Maybe her mother had lived there once. She had never asked what her mother had been before Sky existed, first too young and then too stuck in not asking. She thought that being inside there hurt people so badly it stopped their tongues. Sky wasn’t one to force anyone to talk when they didn’t want to.

Fennel wasn’t back with the fish yet, so Sky put the slightly-wilted snowdrops into an old mug with a drawing of an angry cat on it and some water in it, set it down on the floor away from the fire so that the heat wouldn’t ruin them. She built the fire up with her hands, her own hands, scarred and strong and capable. It was just starting to burn nicely when Fennel came in, stocky body silhouetted against the door frame.

“Look,” Sky said. “Seeds!” She scattered the packets across the floor, a gift.

“Oh, wow.” They smiled, crouched down to look.

“I was thinking we could build a garden.” She wanted it. Wanted Fennel to want it too. Sky imagined plants reaching up to the sun, Fennel freckled and tanned beside them. It was a good thought.

“That’s a lot of work.” Fennel picked up one of the seed packets and looked at the writing on the back. “We’ll need to get started as soon as possible. To prepare the soil.”

“We could get help.” Sky smiled at them. “We have friends.” 

Fennel pulled at their hair, like they did when they were anxious.“What if they don’t come?”

This was the thing Fennel never understood about living out here. Just because people didn’t want to be on top of each other all the time didn’t mean they wouldn’t help. You could live apart and still be good to each other. You could live alone, like Danae, and still be a friend.

“They’ll come,” Sky said. They had come after Sky’s mother left. Noelle and Moss had let her sleep in their home for a week, adjusted their life around her, let her eat at their table and from their stores. It had been work for them. “And we could trade anything we don’t need for stuff we do. Fish for work. Metal for wood.” She shrugged.

“I think Danae knows how to pickle and preserve things.” Fennel was always like this, slow to accept goodness when it was offered. They took it eventually.

“Probably.” Danae was very smart.

“You got fennel seeds,” they said, smiling, and dropped a kiss on Sky’s head.

“Oh, can I grow more of you? I’d like at least three —”

“Menace.” Another kiss, on the mouth, a little more lingering.

“I need to prepare the fish before we do anything with one, two, or three of me.”

They went outside to prepare the fish. Sky followed to help. A smelly, difficult job, but anything with Fennel was easier, brighter. They weren’t perfect, but being with them added just a touch of wonder to everything. After gutting, cleaning, and preparing the fish, they washed their hands in the cold water till they ached. And when that was all done, they went to bed, where it turned out just one Fennel was more than enough.

The next day Fennel started hauling stones into rough rectangles to build the garden. They said they’d put soil in them, plant the seeds when it was time. Sky went to ask people about help.

First, she went to Danae, who lived well near the shore, and was very clever. She said to keep food waste and rot it down for soil. Bury fish skeletons under the roots, she said, because bones are good fertiliser.

“I might come by,” Danae said. She looked a little shy about it. When Danae had been friends with Sky’s mother, she had been confident and free with her thoughts. Sky wasn’t used to thinking of Danae as shy about anything.

“The garden is for everyone,” Sky said. It had just come to her. There would be more than enough for everyone if they all worked on it together. As much or as little as they needed. It would be nicer, she thought, if they had something to bring them together that way. Something to remind them all they weren’t alone, that they had each other.

“I’m not quite old enough to remember before the flood,” Danae said, “but my father was. He talked about tomatoes. I’d like to try those sometime.”

“I did get some tomato seeds. Fennel says they’re good.” Sky would happily share tomatoes, if the tomatoes grew.

There was a chance, Fennel had said, that not all of the seeds would grow. They’d been in the packets a long time, and some of them might have died already. Sky thought the purpose of seeds was to grow. Danae, less shy now, said she would bring a box around for them to start making the compost in.

Next, she went to see Noelle and Moss.

They lived in the bottom three floors of an old tower, the top carved off into the shape of a sharp blade. They were both strong, and their children were getting to the age when they no longer wanted to be called children.

“Me and Fennel are going to build a garden,” Sky said. “You’re welcome to help, and take from it when it’s ready.”

“A garden?” asked their older child, Feather.

“Yes,” Sky said. “My mother told me about gardens. You grow food or flowers. It makes things easier. It makes things lovelier.”

Moss stretched out his back. “A garden,” he said, wonder in his voice. “That would be something to see.”

Noelle smiled. “Well,” she said. “We’ll help. We can build walls, and paths, and dig soil. And it would do the children good to learn.”

“Tell everyone,” Sky said, somewhat reckless. “Tell everyone about the garden. It’s all of ours.”

That was all the people she had the energy for today. But she would tell others, tomorrow and the next day and every day she could, that they were making a garden together.

She reached home as the early spring light was dying, her thighs and hips tired from the long walk. Even so, she could see that Fennel had made a good start, with plant beds marked out by driftwood and rubble. Even more would need to be done. A garden didn’t happen just because you wanted one — you had to work at it.

Sky grinned. “We’re going to build a garden,” she said. She wondered, too, about growing some of the things she liked and foraged from the ruins. It was good to see Fennel so happy about it. Sky was happiest when they shared their joy.

“I should have thought of this ages ago,” Fennel said. “I used to know —” They stopped, took a deep breath, started again. “I used to date a girl who worked in the hydroponics department. She showed me how, though she wasn’t supposed to.”

That was something new. Fennel almost never talked about any of their life before when they could see Sky’s face. They turned away, or closed their eyes, or spoke the words into the dark.

Sky loved them, their broad shoulders and soft stomach, their awkward but strong hands, loved the way they loved her back, and loved the healing wound at the heart of them. So Sky wrapped her arms around their middle, and buried her nose into their chest, to smell them, to breathe them in, sweat and salt.

“We’re going to build a garden,” she said again, with emphasis on garden. “And there’s no one to say we can’t, or to tell us what to grow, or to shout at us for anything.”

Fennel stroked her hair. They hadn’t had a name, when they were thrown out. Presumably they’d been called something, behind the wall, but names were something that shaped you and held you, given in love or taken in full self-knowledge, so they’d never had a name until they chose Fennel. It had taken two weeks, and when they’d named themselves they’d told Sky that Fennel was a herb both delicious and practical, something that would grow in almost any soil.

* * *

It was going well, building the garden. Sky got to see Fennel pointing out the shapes where their seeds would grow. Noelle and Moss came, the children with them. Sky could almost see the excitement, a thin thread trailing out as they moved. They  broke ground, shifted rubble, talked for a bit, until the work got too hard. There was something about it, about them being here.

Fennel was still worried about soil, though. Where they lived had all been buildings once. It had broken down into rubble, dust, and dirt, but the ground was hard and rocky. The soil they did have looked grey, and no matter how large the pile of rocks they pulled out got, the stones never stopped coming.

Sky worried that nothing would grow. Most of the plants that grew here on their own were tough, hardy things that could get nourishment from the tiniest scrap of dust.  Danae and Fennel had talked about fertiliser and rich soil and compost, and how most seeds needed more than gritty earth and water.

According to Danae soil used to be sold in bags, good soil that would feed the most delicate of plants. So Sky and Fennel went back to the place the seeds came from and they found some bags, but not enough. They had to dig up the rest, from places not too wet and not too dry, and take it back in a rusting metal cart that Moss had bought from a trader. What if all this work was for nothing? It might take too long to start the seeds this year.

Sky didn’t get upset often. She had been upset when her mother left, and in those early days when Fennel had been just a walking ball of pain. But normally she was good at taking things as they were and making the best of what she had. This was a survival skill, she supposed.

But she was upset now. This mattered. She had made promises, brought people together, and she wanted to keep it. They might get upset if it took too long to start the garden. Fennel must have seen the private cry she had about it, but they let it be private. She hadn’t known about the soil, and she had started the compost but rot took time, like growing did. There wasn’t enough. 

Every day Sky woke up early with the light and there were more people there, happy and working, and the fear eased. Her friends came, and as the days passed they brought more people. People she knew a little, and even people she had never seen before. 

Eventually there was a bright chill day when at least twenty people were there. All of them had soil, in barrows, in sacks, straining under the weight of it. Sky put a hand to her mouth to stop the noise she wanted to make.

It was no longer Sky and Fennel’s garden. It was everyone’s.

They put the soil down together in the cold, their breath hanging in the air and laughter singing out into the bright sky. It was work, and work that a lot of them weren’t used to, but they did their best. After a few days of people coming with soil and laying it down in the beds that Fennel built, they were all nearly full and ready.

Looking at it, knowing how close it all was — how one load of soil or maybe two would do it — Sky was so full of joy that she had to show them how she felt. She hugged Noelle, tight and happy, and behind her she saw Fennel, smiling delightedly as Moss slapped them on the back. They had nearly done it, together, and it would be theirs together for years to come.

They were so close to done, and the last lot they had chosen to take from just outside of the wall. The people within  those walls didn’t get to claim the soil. They had enough. There was a whole city in there, miles across. They had all the soil they needed.

The walls were huge stone and metal things, casting a shadow so deep nothing grew within three feet. Fennel kept looking up at the walls and frowning as they worked. For all it had been Fennel’s idea to come here, they seemed nervous now.

Then there was a creaking, a squeaking. Sky stopped and looked up at Fennel, who was still and stiff through their shoulders. Sky knew that noise. Fennel probably knew it better.

They both saw the gates open. They saw a small shape shoved out, sent sprawling to the ground. They saw the gates close.

In long strides, Fennel sprinted to the new outcast. Sky followed, leaving their soil in the cart.

The new outcast was only a child. Sky ached at the fury and grief on Fennel’s face.

“A kid,” they said. “They did this to a kid...”

Sky got down on her knees.

“They do this,” Fennel said. They sounded almost on the edge of tears. “If you don’t fit. I was never dangerous, I was just... I just didn’t fit!”

The child wasn’t crying. They looked up at Fennel with wide, scared eyes, then their gaze flickered to Sky.

“They said there’s no one out here.” Thin arms tight around bruised knees.

“They lied,” Fennel said. “That’s what they do. They lie to you, so that you keep doing what they want.”

“I’m someone, and I’m out here,” Sky offered. She made eye contact with Fennel and smiled.

She said to the new outcast, “There are plenty of people out here, we’re building a garden. You’re welcome to help.” And she held out her hand.

C. B. Blanchard is a bisexual, nonbinary writer and poet living in the UK. They focus on weird spec fic with queer themes. A good day includes finding strange things in the woods and thinking about ghosts. Keep up with them on Twitter @BridhC.

Content Notes

The Aloe’s Bargain: injury, references to fatphobia, references to transphobia

This Story is Called “The Transformation of Things”: metaphorical transphobia, ableism

Uncharting Territory: illness and recovery, life-threatening corporate negligence

The Thing About the Jack-o’-Lanterns: bullying, offscreen non-graphic death

Midnight Candy: transphobia

The Mandrake Loves the Olive: threat of violence

Seedlings: body horror

Dandelion Wishes: anxiety

The Princess and the P. Sativum: off-screen attempted assassination, mentions of transphobia

Sapspear Syrup: anxiety, grieving for a parent, mention of transphobia and bullying, substance use

A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting: sex, references to homophobia, references to fantasy creature harm

Folded Into Tendril and Leaf: war, injury, body horror, reference to self-harm, reference to animal harm 

Feeding Coals: depression, difficulty with accepting disability

Reclaiming Our Roots: body horror, blood, mortal peril, mentions of death

How to Make a Spell Jar: transphobia, explosion, implied animal harm

The Tree Whisperer: implied offscreen violence/murder

what the water gave: missing child, mention of blood, mention of animal harm

To Build a Garden: abuse, child abandonment, animal harm, food insecurity 

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Speculatively Queer is a small press in the Pacific Northwest publishing stories about queer hope, joy, love, affirmation, and community. Our first anthology It Gets Even Better: Stories of Queer Possibility can be ordered at speculativelyqueer.com or through your local bookstore or library. Find us on Twitter @specqueer and Instagram @speculativelyqueer.

Isabela Oliveira has been a professional editor for years, from technical documents to pop culture content. While attending college, she kept busy as the poetry editor and later the editor-in-chief of her university’s literary journal, the Salmon Creek Journal. Isabela started speaking on panels at fan conventions in 2016 and has been at it ever since. These days, she’s working as an editor by day, and an occasional podcast co-host, a crafter and maker, and an aspiring voice actress in her free time.

Jed Sabin is a jack-of-all-trades with professional experience as an editor, writer, scientist, project coordinator, and logistics manager. At age 17 (before Kickstarter existed!) they successfully crowdfunded and produced a geeky pin-up calendar that was featured on Neil Gaiman’s blog. They were editor-in-chief of their college student newspaper, and they worked as an editor on the popular Kickstarter-funded Maze of Games puzzle novel. Their writing has been published by Daily Science Fiction and Wired Magazine.

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Deepest thanks to our fabulous contributors and cultural consultants/sensitivity readers; to Laya Rose for licensing her delightful Pride Cacti stickers to us as well as creating our gorgeous cover; to Friday Elliott of Friday Afternoon Tea for curating a lovely tea sampler themed on the book; to Dan Shih for having our back; to everyone who submitted amazing queer botanical stories we couldn’t include; to the multitude of folks who supported and promoted the Kickstarter; and again to RB and V, whose roots hold our soil together.