Table of Contents

The Cruel Ship’s Captain

Harvey Welles and Philip Raines

Reasoning about the Body

Ted Chiang

Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders’ Flash Fever

Patty Houston

Sleep

Carlea Holl-Jensen

Three Poems by Lindsay Vella

The Way to the Sea

Spit Out the Seeds

Thirst

The Other Realms Were Built With Trash

Rahul Kanakia

Alice: a Fantasia

Veronica Schanoes

Dueling Trilogies

Darrell Schweitzer

Absence of Water

Sean Melican

The Seamstress

Lindsay Vella

Three Hats

Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

Poor summer, she doesn’t know she’s dying.

Lindsay Vella

Death’s Shed

J. M. McDermott

Dear Aunt Gwenda: Dangers of Hibernation Edition

Gwenda Bond

About These Authors

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

December 2010 · Issue 26

Made by: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and Michael J. DeLuca.

Readers: Su-Yee Lin, Samantha Guilbert, Cristi Jacques. Extra thanks: Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles, Hannah Goldstein, Matthew Harrison.

Cover: Sarah Goldstein, “Broken Stick.” Year: 2004. Size: 11” x 10.” Materials: acrylic medium, gouache on paper.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.26, December 2010. ISSN 1544-7782. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw

Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 17 for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets. LCRW is available as an ebook through smallbeerpress.com, WeightlessBooks.com, and Fictionwise.com, and occasionally as a trade paperback and ebook from lulu.com/sbp. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414. Electronic edition displayed on your fresh and shiny pixels.

These days we’re always behind in our reading, sorry. Thanks to the writers for their patience—especially Darrell, whose misplaced poems took five years to reach print(!), Sean, and Phil & Harvey (whose stories took two or three years). Down below there are some books we’re working on for 2011. Not all of those covers are final. There are a few books missing and then there is a chapbook—the last, we expect, for a while—by Hal Duncan, An A-Z of the Fantastic City, which we hope to publish in spring.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Cruel Ship’s Captain

Harvey Welles and Philip Raines

He was called the Cruel Ship’s Captain, though the tales were too slippery to be exact on what that told. In portside sinks, sailors muttered into their pints of the cruel captain of a ship, while in the becalmed days of a long voyage, bored passengers fantasized about the captain of a cruel ship. But now, brought before the beau-nasty himself on the deck of his awful vessel, Settle could see that while the tales forked in the telling, they knotted in the truth, and the knot pressed into her throat like the invisible rope of her all-but-certain fate.

The Cruel Captain prowled the foc’stle deck, round and round the fore topmast like a chained holiday bear, frothing the air with spittle and glee. Bedizened like the devil’s dandy, he wore the articles of his faith: a purple frock coat off some frenchee admiral, a high guardsman hat with a dinner-plate shine and Good Queen Meg’s insignia kiss, the long silver-buckled boots of a Londinium salon king, all raggedy and sprayed with the violence of their getting. His face was hazed with hairy straggle and a filigree branding of the skin whose marks were lost through the distance. And his eyes—to Settle, his eyes were pits and suns, alternating in her vision between inescapable midwinters and June dazzlers. Before such an impudent gaze, she should have stepped back and swooned with the propriety of a woman of her station—had there been the room for such graces, had she been foolhardy enough to display a station, had they known she was a woman.

The Cruel Captain only wanted one thing. “Yer ships,” he slurred and growled, drunk and furious. “Ye’re all for Hell now and I want my fleet of the damned. Ye can join us on devil seas or ye can swim back to Heaven and suck the lamb’s cock for forgiveness.”

The Cruel Ship showered the company with her own foul gob. The oak-carved figurehead tried to twist off her bowsprit spine, a right arch doxy with her face painted ruby-lipped and deathmask, her hair, autumn leaves tumbling gold into winter, her exposed bosom, pink petals in early snow. Furious at her fixture to the boat’s forward cut, she mad-tommed the rest of the crew put together. And her eyes were as flat and lifeless as the engraved Jesus in a flotsam bible.

“Don’t sauce the geesers!” she screeched. “Don’t fedaddle with cooking and dinner manners and the like. Tear it out of them! Tear the ships from their geeser souls raw!”

The Cruel Captain joined his Ship on a high-pitched note of pure fury, the cry of wild things escaping from paradise together. Then he explained, “Right, now let’s see if ye’re the souls or the scraps.”

But they should all have been souls. That was why Settle had set out on The Righteous Dream in the first place: to become souled, to return home shipped. The Minister of her home in Spithampton, Long Preston, had organised the voyage on behalf of a Crown charity dedicated to those who had come into maturity without their ships revealing themselves—for youngsters like Apple and Settle, old enough for parents to begin to worry about them, and for those like Doctor Wendell who had hid unshipped all their lives for reasons too private to divulge. The open sea was said to call out ships. As of yesterday, four had already manifested themselves aboard the Dream. Settle remembered the celebrations as the newly-shipped swam out to the fresh vessels, taking the tills while Long Preston roused the passengers in hymns. But all such memories had been overwhelmed by the sight of the Cruel Ship as it had relentlessly borne down on them during the six-hour chase.

“Fiendishness!” bellowed Long Preston. “Cursed man—do you think you can seize a man’s ships like Jahweh at the Judgement?”

The Minister was the only survivor of the Dream who did not press back behind the other captives. When the Cruel Ship’s sailors had seized the women and thrown them overboard, without pause for the plainly pregnant lasses, Long Preston had fought like the old lion he was in the pulpit, but had been cast back into the kirk of his fellow passengers. Still, he stepped forward again, his white beard electrified in an invisible storm, an accusing finger so bony that it could have been skinned.

But the Cruel Captain laughed and he spat, and where the spit landed, the nearest crew-member, a scrawny duke of limbs, took up the laughter, “Yer Captain is yer Jahweh now,” he pronounced and with demon strength wrestled Long Preston over the edge of the boat.

The crew guffawed, raised their pistols and waited. Settle pressed deeper into the others. Applethwaite, who had pledged his protection, shielded her from sweeps of the Cruel Captain’s gaze. “Apple,” Settle began, but her lips were fossilized with fear. Her lips, but not her bowels, which pissed in a warm burst, or her legs, which vibrated uncontrollably. The boy’s breeches she had thrown on as the fighting raged on the Dream’s deck were dark enough to hide the stains, just as the scarf bound tight around her chest hid her budding womanhood. The boys and men around her—the sailors and passengers, now the Cruel Captain’s chattel—did not see through her mummer, or at least, could not see beyond their own terror.

Only her dear Apple could see her, just as he saw her heart a half-mooned night barely two days ago when they had pledged themselves. “Stay close, Settle sweet,” her barely-manned boy whispered as steadily as he could. “I will hold you up.”

The Cruel Ship’s crew penned them into a sheep ring. As the afternoon unsheathed and the smoke and flame of The Righteous Dream receded into the night, Settle stared at the bloated head of the Dream’s captain, spiked like a prize to one of the masts, until she found her own keel, a will to live.

The Cruel Captain wanted ships. He could not take the ships of those whose lives had already set sail, the sailors of the Dream whose ships had already been fathomed from childhood. He craved unshipped men—but how to tag the shipless passenger from the brined sailor? Both had foreseen the fate of those taken by the Cruel Ship and had time to jumble their rags as the Dream gurgled its last. Passenger and crew were a single tribe now.

The Cruel Captain bided. One by one, the captives lost to sleep, one by one, their bodies sagged and curled onto the deck. As sleep churned their dreaming, the Cruel Captain’s men scanned the dark fan of the ship’s wake. If it was a sailor, one of the shipped, it appeared, out there—a boat, faint in the muslin-light of the clouded sky. A schooner, or a fine frigate in miniature, or a rough sculler. The jack tars pointed and laughed, joking about the ship-shape and vigour of each, then dragged out the sleeping sailor and gave him to the sea. But if it was a passenger or one of the powder monkeys, the unshipped, the boats still docked in their dreams and the Cruel Ship’s backwash lay undisturbed. Their bodies were pulled from the mass, leg-ironed, but led away in safety.

Settle would not sleep. She was unshipped as yet, but all through the Dream’s journey, she had felt its immanence. What if tonight was the night, what if her ship chose to slip her lethe now? Her adolescence was cusped, her blood had started in flow over a year ago. Shipness came to most when the jibs of adulthood were set. Surely it must be soon.

She clasped her Apple and he provided her a trunk in his arm, the breeze through the leaves in his soft prayers. She would not drift. Passengers and sailors made pacts and fell asleep together to confuse the Cruel Captain’s men, but they were prodded awake in turn until a ghost ship faded and the ‘souls’ could be divined from the ‘scraps.’

Settle urged herself through the long night, the cold ache of the dawn, the slow blister towards noonday. She pinched Applethwaite awake, she caught Doctor Wendell when he fainted dead, and into the second night, as the crew heaved dark matter from the hold overboard and the water beneath boiled with frenzied gulls, Settle denied herself thoughts of home, holding back memories of Father’s chanteys and the coze of Spithampton’s familiar quays as those around her surrendered. But she was only a girl and her strength was a cup not a pint. She pitched, Apple’s hands and his urgent “Settle!” tried to hold her. And she dreamt—

—of open seas on a calm night. Not a ship, not a wink, and she sighed to herself, relieved, and she cringed, disappointed that it was still not yet. Nothing but horizon, though great things moved below the shallow ripples.

When she woke, a face, a boiled chestnut pierced at each ear with a wine cork and framed by hedgehog chops, leered at her. “Well, here’s a lucky little one,” he said. “A fine prentice—not lumber.”

Settle was slapped in irons and taken away, no longer branded captive but marked for crew.

Of the nineteen passengers of the Dream, only six others survived to indenture. Pale Dr. Wendell, in a constant twitter since the disaster, three deranged Wessex boys who were latterly pretending to be brothers despite being strangers all through the Dream’s voyage, a man whose wits refused to shine through a fixed expression—and her Apple. Taken aft, they were ironed to a length of rack in the grain storage, which they shared with rat skitter and the suck of the waterline beyond the hull. But they were given a sip of water, a hack of bread and a promise that one day they would have a bunk and a share of the revelry—as soon as they offered their ships to the Cruel Captain.

“Apple, if they discover—”

“They will not, my Settle.”

In private at last, he could smudge Settle’s cheeks with ship grime, button high her canvas shirt, check her roughly-chopped locks. He nestled close as the others slept. “I gave you my oath as we crossed the equator and I will keep it under southern stars, northern stars, any constellation you can imagine.”

But shortly after first light, they were separated. A party of sailors rattled their pistols against the rack and chains and ahoy-ed the prentices awake. “First day of schooling,” the oldest said. Settle recognised the tug of a man with judge’s whiskers from the ordeal on deck. “No red carpet in the Academy, but ye’re welcome all the same.”

Settle was taken by the Judge, her Apple, Dr Wendell and the Wessex brothers by the other sailors, while the dazed man was left behind. The Judge exchanged looks with another sailor, and they agreed with barely a nod. Settle never saw the unwitted man again.

The Judge guided her through the bowels of the Cruel Ship, jerking the chain to remind her of his meanness, but prattering easily about his arthritis and the cook’s little jokes with rat’s turds. Settle had to twist her ears to hear through the accents, both the Judge’s own gutter growl and the Ship’s creaks and belches. The boat had more belly than she would have sworn from the speed with which it ran down the Dream. Close to the deck, the crew slept in bunks ranked tighter than steerage in a colony ship. The stench was dizzying, speaking of decades, not just years of confinement, but Settle checked her refined instincts. Below the common layers of the Ship, Settle could see further circles descending into the hellish darknesses below, pulsing with unexplained sighs and moans.

The Judge took her along the ship’s hull, throbbing with the pressure of the sea above, and issued her with a mop and a bucket. “Give the old girl a Queen Meg ha’penny.” Settle was frightened to ask what he meant, but the Judge quickly added, “There’s a proper wash and shave.”

The skin of the hull was slick with a clear oil. It was not condensate, but an ooze that coated the tough bristles sprouting out of wood rashed by ancient termites. The lanternlight pearled the drops that clung to the tips.

Settle understood. She swabbed the surface, drained the excess from the mop into the bucket where it thickened into a murky yellow paste. Using shears, the Judge shaved the hull, cutting the hair close to the wood. Each tendril snapped like a firecracker.

They worked their way down one end of the Ship. After a few hours and what she hoped was a companionable silence, Settle asked as gruffly as she could muster, “What about food and drink?”

She held her breath at her daring, but in two days, all she had eaten was a few bites of stony bread. The Judge picked up two bristles from the floor, gave one to Settle and chewed the other like tobacco. “Best soften her in the gob first,” he said, “before washing her down.”

“With what?” Settle looked around for a flask.

The Judge tapped the bucket with his dirty bare foot. “But sip her first. If grog and crank fucked for a month, ye’d still never get juice with more blow.”

They harvested a bag of bristles and three buckets of brew while the Judge whistled skeleton jigs and execution songs. After they slopped the lot to the cook, the Judge gave Settle a tour of the forward head and a sponge to keep. Hidden at last, she relieved herself. She could remember who she was and let the tears at the loss of the Dream and horror at the Judge’s manners and dread at her plight surge on a spring tide of feeling. She gripped the splinters of the door frame, feeling the canter of the Cruel Ship, praying that she did not have to go back out, that she could stay here with the ship’s motion forever.

But the Captain’s voice snaked through the mass of boat to find her. Hunt that wind, ye darling wretches, hunt it and hump it and trap its roar. Take us off the charts. Find us something amazing in the dried-up shit fens of this world. And any slack and ye’ll be skinned and sugared in salt!

So Settle gripped her will and came forth and allowed herself to be taken back to the secure store.

That night, she and Applethwaite separated themselves from the others—the Wessex boys huddled in their own speak while Dr Wendell tried to ingratiate himself with the cook’s monkeys through the slats of the door. Apple had spent his day labouring to move the Dream’s seized cannon as the armourer determined which of the Cruel Ship’s guns were in need of replacement.

“Our supervisor had not been a sailor—he let slip that he was once a Rutland farmhand,” he explained. “A passenger like us. Unshipped.”

“I do not understand, Apple. What happened to him? What will happen to us?”

“These questions come too soon, my sweet Settle. All I can say is that the Captain is recruiting.”

“Then what is he recruiting for?”

But there was no one to tell them and they were tired to their marrows. She fell asleep listening for something that would tell her, but all she could hear was the figurehead wailing drunkenly, calling for the Captain to poke her in a flyer, cursing the winds for teasing and not mounting her, a dementia that faded as Settle returned again to the open sea of her dreams.

Her dreams disconcerted her. Still no whisper of her ship, only grand creatures close to the surface that refused to reveal themselves. Why were her reveries not of the Dream? That happy voyage—why not go back to the long afternoons of lazily-ravelled passenger bonhomie, evening lessons boomed by Long Preston over dinner, twilight choruses of sailors hailing the sun on her loop about the planet? The Dream’s survivors would not discuss it, nor even acknowledge each other—a blessing given Settle’s disguise, but one that emptied her of any comfort other than Apple’s embrace.

So she placed another life away in the Dream while she mopped and trimmed for the crew’s meals. A life where their passage was never crossed by the Cruel Ship, where they followed the equator until, one by one, all the passengers were found by their own ships. She dreamt of them all returning through the Londinium Flats, a flotilla of manifest destinies, and Father and Apple’s uncle and step-aunt waiting at the docks as she and her newly-beloved announced their news. And she dreamt further, hers and Apple’s ships joined on the sea—maybe as a fishery, perhaps as an inland cruiser, and sometimes, when her urges were more dashing, a smuggler or a spy for the Crown—

The dreams always faltered. Settle was unshipped and she could not imagine what her own boat would be like. As a life’s purpose cleared from the mist of childhood, ships were supposed to shake loose all a child’s fantasies and speculations and drop into the waters of the waking world. Ships bore fate. Queen Meg’s was a vast, dry-docked galley, once a fearsome fireship at war’s cutting edge, now a floating palace of burnished oak and gilt sails that shone as the jewel on the necklace of the Tham and had grown with the Empire’s reach across the seas. Father’s was a simple barge, dull but prized in Settle’s eyes for its lack of pretension, a tub designed for routine crossings of the pinch of Spit Bay and the routine fate Father had fashioned after the influenza took her mother. Neither hinted at the shape of Settle’s ship or her destiny—but nor had any other ship or destiny she could fathom.

Father had never pressed her to join the Dream—Settle had craved it for herself. I can feel my future surging inside me, like a wave trapped in a bottle, she had told the other passengers. I would command my ship to appear if only my voice could carry!

Applethwaite and Doctor Wendell had laughed at such violent sentiments coming from such soft lips, and indeed, Settle had even surprised herself. Her Apple had said, I would simply be happy to be part of another ship, and then taking her into the harbour of his gaze, an ark for two. While Doctor Wendell had coughed into his fancy kerchief and twittered, Oh yes! Another ship! A mighty vessel—to be part of someone else’s grand scheme, and never to be alone in one’s dreams—oh no!

Doctor Wendell meant grand schemes like the Dream, a composite like the other ships of the line—and like the Cruel Ship. But the Dream had been a voluntary union of ship and soul—unlike the Cruel Ship. This boat had swelled with the bones and boards of other vessels and lives, taking on its stock in a restless voyage that old dogs swore had been continuing since their grandfathers’ boyhoods. The Ship had exhausted every ocean, seizing whatever it could take, driven on by a desperation that stained the atmosphere as emphatically as the stewed air.

In the days that followed their capture, as they headed south into seas so warm the seaweed formed phantasmic continents, Settle studied how the Ship had been pieced from its far-flung jetsam. The hull was quilted from teak, birch, wood she could not name, from the hide-stretched line of a canoe, the polish and varnish of a princely schooner, the thick-tarred roughness of a city junk. Every section was staked out in private chapels, accretions of personal faith formed from enamel likenesses, locks of hair, a baby’s sucker, mementoes all tacked and roped by the crew and made royal by the liberal jewelling of precious stones the crew must have seized from other unfortunates. For all their hidden dreaming, they slept in a tangle of each other and moved like assemblies whenever the Cruel Captain barked. The Cruel Ship and its crew breathed and farted in the rhythm of a single organism.

But there were still parts of the vessel that were too intimate for any of them. Some evenings, the dark spaces in the Ship’s gut slushed with a wet moaning that could drown out the figurehead’s lewd cries or the Captain’s drunken songs.

When she asked him about the lower levels, the Judge reluctantly broke his whistling. “The Ship’s spun the globe time and time over and many have crewed with the Captain,” he said. “Not all left when their contracts were cleaned.”

So even the dead could not break the Cruel Ship’s hold. “But it’s not all ghosties,” he added. “She carries her own waters down there.”

Settle had a flash of the powerful things that flowed below her dreams and shivered. She startled when the moan grew louder, shifting in the ship’s strange echo chamber so that it came from above.

The Judge hiccupped with delight. “Not all blowing’s out the arse,” he said. “Her Majesty is getting impatient and she’s a mouthy old cow.”

He meant the figurehead, whose clamour was becoming more earnest by the day. “Aye—she’ll want her gifts before the wedding.”

“A wedding?” Settle asked. “Who is to be married?”

“Worry least about the bride and groom,” the Judge warned her, “and most about whether ye can get an invitation.”

The Judge licked the side of the hull, his eyes rolled white with the taste, and winked at Settle. “And if ye’ve an intention to join the Ship, time ye did before the wedding. We don’t carry lumber long.”

Oh, if it were only so simple a matter of intention. Joining the crew was not a decision—it was straightforward possession, seizure of the newly-shipped’s destiny. That was clear later that night when they witnessed Doctor Wendell discover his oars for the first time.

“I feel it,” he moaned in his sleep, his face a sheet of fever, and then, “Oh yes, my Captain, willingly.”

In response, hooting broke out on deck. Feet and hands, battering across, down, everyone a powder monkey as sailors rushed towards the store room. The Cruel Ship groaned in satisfaction, a sound that shook the timbers, and Apple clapped a hand over Settle’s mouth as the sailors burst in.

“Graduation day!”

“A wee ketch, winking there in our stream.”

“Oh, he’s the genuine tar now—so let’s welcome the bugger to tar nation!”

A jug of Ship’s sweat was upended in the Doctor’s mouth and he started babbling low-tide Latin. All dressed in their christening finery, stitched roughly from flags and petticoats, his new mates dragged him from the store, wrenching his wrists until they remembered to un-iron him. Terrified, Settle and Apple wrapped themselves in each other’s comfort while the crew celebrated on despite the dawn, taking their accounts over the side in singsongs of retching, letting sails flap for a few hours. They made up a new saint’s day, and no one came for the captives that morning.

The first news they had of Wendell was the day after, when Apple reported from topside. “Never so changed a man,” he muttered, shaking his head for the sense of it. He refused to say further, but Settle found some distinction in the Wessex jabber of the three brothers. They talked of backgammon and jelly-roll for the Captain. They did not talk of him as a compatriot.

“I would rather drown than give myself to this abominable boat,” Settle promised.

Apple bit his lip. He so wanted to be the man in saying the thing that would anchor her. “There could be a way.”

“Anything, dearest Apple. I cannot live with the thought of my ship joining these savages.”

“Do you remember what Long Preston told us? About hiding our ships?”

And she did, the words tumbling forth like boxes bursting from a locked cupboard door. A ship carries your destiny—but we can be ships for each other’s destiny as well, the Minister had instructed them over dinner on the Dream. You all have someone who can carry you into your future. A true desire. If you find yours, then your ship can harbour in secret in their dreams.

Her true desire? “Apple?” she said—nearly a sob. And then when she was sure he was asleep, she whispered into his dreams, over and over, You will not leave me.

Settle was rousted by more banging in the pit of the night. “Apple!” she cried out, thinking his ship had arrived at last, but Apple was looking at her, wide-eyed, still hers. The Judge clattered with his keys and burst the door. His eyes were shining too. “Get yourself ready for our visitor,” he said, “Treasure!”

No time for the tale. The sailor who daily supervised Apple and the Wessex boys said to the Judge, “Soft hands.”

“Today will scab them.” The Judge asked the captives, “Ever used a harpoon before?”

They shook their heads.

“Keep feet clear of the lines. Butter, don’t jam the wind-up. And aim at the beastie.” He pointed at the other sailor. “Not Ralfie here—the beastie in the water.”

A monster! Settle’s mouth was parched with excitement. Stories of sea creatures had swaddled her childhood in Spithampton like a second mother, nurturing her in the horror and lure of a developing imagination. The prospect of such a wonder made Settle forget the certainty of danger—but she was not to join the other captives at the guns. The Judge took her through the maelstrom of belowdecks. Crew were strapping knives to legs and arms, reworking lucky tattoos with pens, braiding shell blessings into their locks, asking for forgiveness before their altars in the hull. Everyone’s face was covered in a mask of sweat and hunger, so that there were beasties everywhere Settle looked.

Then, as if Jahweh had flicked His hand over the universe, the hubbub stopped dead. The Captain was speaking. Despite the distance and yards of timber and noise between them, it was easy to hear him, as if the Ship arranged the acoustics specially. At the sound of his voice, Settle’s skin prickled with excitement and she finally comprehended who was bride and who was groom. She experienced a myriad of twinges too small and confusing to manifest a true feeling.

“Look at her beauty!” he told his crew. “It dumbs every ship that sees her. It sets every heart against us in jealousy.”

He did not mean the monster—he was talking about the figurehead, though what glamour he invested in that block of wood was hidden from Settle. “Her beauty is too much for the mortal plane. Her wedding day is coming, my boys. Let’s make her too beautiful for Heaven and Hellfire as well!”

Settle was put to work with the monkeys. She was stationed just below the quarter deck in the weapons store, where the harpoons were racked like vicious sets of teeth. The Judge removed one and dipped its tip in a bowl of aniseed-smelling blue liquid that he daintily topped up from a bottle in his shirt pocket.

“Where’s that from?” Settle asked of the liquid.

The Judge did not turn from his ginger task. “Did it come from the bilge?” she pressed him.

“For most of the Ship, the inquiring disposition is a virtue in a tar,” the Judge finally said, “but not all.”

Settle thought about the secrets of the dark belly below them, but there was no time to gather wool. Her task was monkey business—to bear the poison-tips through the Ship and pass them onto monkeys at the stairwell. She understood it was safer for the harpoons to be transported under the decks than in the mess of action up above, but it was fastidious work in a storm. The Ship tacked and rolled with the ferocity of pursuit and Settle dosey-doed around crew duffle, weapon firm in both hands. Halfway along the emptied quarters, there was an almighty crash. A great thing must be throwing itself against the sides, Settle thought, and she nearly lost her grip on the spear. Shouts above her: sight of the Monster. Her heart lurched with excitement.

When she passed the harpoons to the monkeys, she yearned to follow them onto the stage above, but the boys snarled Faster! Faster! and she had to run back to the Judge, careful to avoid getting skewered by another monkey with a harpoon. She tried to imagine what was going on overhead.

Settle picked out the story from her imagining. Sailors manned the harpoon guns, cranking them up, scouring the boiling sea as the Ship turned to give them the decisive shot. The Monster wheeled mirror close. It only gave the sailors a quick moment to fire, but they did not linger. Harpoons sizzled the air, ropes whipping out behind them.

Enraged, the Monster threw itself against the Ship. Its fury was a weird crying of the wind, a ululation of many voices, as if it was hunting as a family. But its sound could not measure against the curses of the figurehead, berating the crew: For my wedding day, my bonny, bonny bastards!

Settle heard the weapons strike packed flesh in satisfying chunks. The thumping of the hull gradually flattened. The Ship’s rolling smoothed. Then, at last, a raggedy cheer from the sailors. Settle cheered too, the Judge slapped her back and the Captain bellowed: He’s ours, boys! Now strip him for our beauty!

“Treasure for our beauty!” the Judge answered, and grabbing Settle, skipped through the Ship, gathering monkeys, ignoring the discarded harpoons rolling across the floor, and came up on deck into a crowd lumping around the fore topmast. Crew were unrolling the nets over starboard, unscrewing the harpoon guns so that there was room for heaving. In the red foam below, swimmers made certain the Monster was snarled, then the sailors took each of the ropes and tug-of-warred until the carcass lipped the edge. “Oh, how he sparkles!” the figurehead cried out, and with one final heave, the Ship tipped and the mass slithered onto the deck.

Settle squeezed between gaps among the sailors. All she could see was a vast jelly across the boards. The crew jigged their feet to avoid tentacles still flapping. The Monster’s skin sparked like tiny fireworks and Settle had to shield her eyes. Squinting men moved in with hooked sticks and shepherded the body towards the edge of the hold. Poured, the Monster slurped through the hatch, leaving a trail of clear slime, trapped minnows and tiny shells on the deck.

The Judge took her over to the edge, gripped her head so she looked down with the other sailors. In a circle of sunlight, a great, lifeless eye looked back up and for a moment, the eye was Long Preston, the passengers and crew of the Dream, her Spithampton life, all the dead ones looking back at Settle. But then Settle saw. The eye was lidded with shine. Folds and bubbles of bejewelled skin, amethysts and opals embedded in the flesh, hard bone of pollen crystal poking through the cuts and slashes of the behemoth’s body. A golden ooze flowed across the hold floor, thickening in the sunlight, becoming a dazzling crust.

Yes—treasure. The Judge handed her a cutting knife.

All at once, sailors and monkeys were jumping into the hold as lanterns were hooked along the hatch edge. All fell into frenzy as they untaped their knives, stabbed and gouged the flesh, scooping out jewels, filling their pouches as fast as they could. The slough of their days disappeared and Settle felt the collective shudder, the relief that the crew had found a new thing in the world, but she also sensed the deeper rumble, the ship’s hunger that could never be satisfied.

Settle’s eyes drank. She wanted the treasure. She leaned into the hole, but the Judge held her back. “The share for the Captain, the best for his lady, the rest for the crew,” he told her. “But nothing for prentices. When ye’re shipped, ye can draw.”

Settle’s heart thinned—but she was not simply to be a witness. The Judge pushed her in the back and she fell into the circle, only just missing a sailor hacking at a stalk sheathed in silver filigree. The air stank of fish and determination.

Settle stepped over tentacles. She stared down into the faces of small dolls. Mermaids tipped the monster’s tentacles, beautiful women who must have made that sound she had heard during the pursuit. Some were still wriggling, softly cursing the feet that trampled them. Their distress made Settle want to cradle them. Their tiny necklaces of sweet stones made her finger her knife.

“He’s a fine ugly bastard,” the Judge said of the creature. “Though we’ve seen bastards of his like before. All their likes. A man can’t stop hoping that the next one will be wondrous.”

The Judge showed her the creature’s huge maw: a burrow of pink flesh, veined with emerald. “But treasure is the measure. And the best is always deep inside. Needs the slightest hand to find the most precious.”

The monkeys eyed her suspiciously. “But I’m not crew,” Settle said.

The Judge was unexpectedly tender. “P’haps if ye see the beauty, p’haps if it ships ye—then p’haps ye could be crew.”

Settle crawled into the mouth, pushing the lantern ahead of her. The tight passage was slick. I am being unborn, she thought, retching at the faint smell of undigested meat. All around her, the cave was fairy-tale with booty.

Diamonds! The gullet was lined with them, some as large as peach stones. What should she gather? She started cutting, picking the jewels out like potatoes from the ground, stuffing them into the pouch the Judge had given her.

A different kind of shimmer caught her eye. A line of pearls around the muscle of something like a tongue. Pearls like a giant’s teardrops. Her eyes and heart goggled with amazement. She fetched out the six beauties, rubbed each and stared into their twinkles. Perspective see-sawed. Settle was looking into the dew one moment, the next she was gazing out to the black night sky. The dizziness nearly made her drop one of the pearls. She tore a snatch of the muslin about her chest and formed a small purse. She scooped the treasure and shoved the purse down her trousers.

When Settle crawled back out, the Judge retrieved the pouch of diamonds and she said nothing of the pearls. The Captain was summoning them back. Reluctantly, the sailors put away their knives and shimmied up the ropes. Up top, the sailors lined up to give their share to the Captain on the foc’stle, holding their handfuls for him to select the choicest. He squinted at each one hopefully, but always in disappointment, dripping them all into a pile at his feet. Whatever he was looking for was not there.

While he held his court, a barber attended to what sprouts there were of his beard. “Is the Captain always so concerned about his appearance after a fight?” Settle asked.

The Judge shook his head. “The Captain is concerned about something else,” he said, pointing at the dead sailors, victims of the Monster, now heaped along the side. She studied the barber: he was not cutting at all, but dabbing in a flurry of pinpricks. A tattoo beat. Settle understood—the faces of each of the dead, memorialized on the Captain’s face. A gazette sprawled down his chin, deep into his chest. How many were recorded there? Faces on faces, more dead than living skin.

And suddenly, how Settle wanted to pay her respects to her predecessors. Her head filled with thoughts of going up to the Captain, breaking into the line of sailors so she could press her lips to this face then that face, kissing strangers all the way down the Captain’s neck until he would reach down, grab her hair and pull her lips up to his—

“Where is the Ship share, fartleberries!” the figurehead bansheed. “Is this how you respect the bride?”

The sailors hurried along to the bowstrip. One by one, they slipped jewels in hastily-made string nets and rings around the figurehead’s stiff fingers and lacquered neck, fitted armbands and fashioned garters, until by the end of the line sailors had to balance rubies in the dips between her breasts. The Captain was last, feeding diamonds into his lover’s mouth, until she was brimful, sealing her with a gentle kiss on the cold wood. The Ship’s sigh blew across the water, a breath that rustled between the cracks in the timbers and shivered down the sails. Settle was weird with jealousy.

“And does our beauty not astound?” the Captain addressed his crew. “Whatever else can we need for the wedding?”

“A roast!” the former Doctor Wendell shouted out to widespread laughter.

“Then what do we say to the juice of a spitted whale?” the Captain answered and the crew roared with the joy of a yuletide carol.

But Settle could not look away from the figurehead. She could not dam the hatred pouring out of her, converging on her nemesis as if a stare would carry away the demonic dell in its flood. Finery was wasted on her. Settle could accomplish so much more, displaying not just the gaudy decoration but the grandeur of spirit proper for such a fine treasure.

Yet there was more to the crew’s gifts. There before Settle’s eyes, the stone and mineral draping the figurehead underwent a breathless transformation. The treasure sank into her—as if the wood had gone from skin to sand, the gifts fading into the painted surface like snowflakes fallen too soon.

The last to go were the diamonds. The figurehead belched, the flying jib snapping with the force of it. “Our beauty is terrifying,” she blessed them all. “Even the water bows before our beauty. Oh, we will fly now. We will find the undiscovered land. We will see creatures never before sighted. And we will hunt a wedding roast fit for Queen Meg herself!”

When the sailors’ cheers died down, the Ship’s voice darkened. “But it seems that not all here respect beauty. Some of ye haven’t made tokens. I can smell it. One of ye has kept the greatest prize from me. A treasure beyond yer pintpot wits. A dowry bestowed by the sea itself.”

The hidden purse pulled Settle with the weight of the whole ocean rather than a handful of pearls.

“Beauty does not forgive,” the Ship hissed.

Who would dare take the sea’s own wedding gift to the Ship? Everyone eyed one another with suspicion, the Captain scrutinized any who came across his sight and all studied the apprentices like criminals waiting for the sentence not the verdict. The Wessex brothers could not endure. Within a day of the hunt, two shipped and joined the crew. Left alone, the third broke free of his work duty, jumped overboard and sank his body with pocketfuls of jewels prised from the chapel walls of the hull.

Surely this should be enough to end the speculation, Settle hoped, but the figurehead still called through the night, “Beauty does not forgive!”

Why had she done it, she asked herself. Why keep the pearls? What was she thinking? Oh, Settle knew what she was thinking. She was thinking, Such prizes are not for empty spirits like the Ship. She was thinking about what colour of dress would show the pearls off best. But she could not bring herself to look into the pouch. Even in the privacy of the head, where she replaced the bloody bandages of her flow, she did not dare take them out, no matter how much she wanted to enjoy that dizziness again. The only place she trusted herself was in her dreams.

She should have been dreaming of her very own ship or the nightmare of being dragged as bait, but the open sea was undisturbed. The white masses swam menacingly below, but did not break the surface. Only here, under a clear night sky, could she take out the pearls, now strung on a silver wire. The Captain’s voice floated across the water, a groggy croon from the waking world, and in a moment’s instinct, without a further thought, Settle made her own offering to him.

She regarded the pearls and understood that there was something special about the jewels most prized by the Ship. She hurled them upwards and the necklace floated in the air with his voice, a circle suspended between water and space. The loop stretched. Downwards, and Settle followed the plunge into the sea, into a wave, a thimble of water, and saw the oceans cupped within each drop, filled with tiny monsters and bijou wonders. Upwards, and she climbed the rope into Heaven, up amongst the stars, through frozen and miraculous distances, then over the brow of the necklace back through cloud and down again into the water.

Settle woke, spitting. She shook with fever. She was warm as if touched in a certain way and she looked up, expecting the Captain.

“Apple,” she whispered, reaching for his warm body but finding only a cooling shadow.

He was already awake, lying against the bulkhead. His gaze was transfixed by some inner harpoon.

He and Settle had hardly spoken since the hunt. “Settle,” he said, “My ship is coming.”

He was trying so hard to be strong, but tears coursed his cheeks. “I promised you. I promised you.”

She touched his leg, shushed him.

“Settle, tell me about our wedding day.”

“My love will be dressed in silk the colour of an undiscovered ocean. I will be dressed in pearls.”

“I wanted to be strong like you. I wanted to be you.”

“And our families will sit down to a feast of roasted whale.”

“Settle, please—I do not want to leave.”

She gathered him to her, rocked him. “Then stay.”

Long Preston had told her: in the dreams of your heart’s desire, you can hide your ship. Hush, hush, she told Apple, and fiddled with the buttons on his trousers.

The fever got stronger and Settle swayed with the violent motion in her heart. But the strength was in her now. She rolled on top, kissing around his stubble, still so much a boy’s, and called him to a safe harbour.

It was a waking dream. The sea opened before her as she closed her eyes. After nervous fumbling, she commanded a rhythm, until finally, it glided into view: a smart schooner, two-masted, but with sails half-rolled, uncertain. Apple’s ship. She made the clouds stay apart and withheld the waves, and the schooner settled into sunlight and calm waters.

They slept. Only Settle woke the next morning.

When the Judge and Apple’s duty master came, they inspected the empty manacles and glowered. “He crews a galleon in Heaven now,” she told them.

They accepted this—where else could a prentice hide aboard the Ship? He would not have been the first to take a final midnight stroll on the upper deck.

But Settle waited for the Judge to leave her alone at her swabbing the next morning before she put down the bucket. She had to be sure that Apple was away. Quickly, she scooted the circumference of the hull, through the stores, the crew quarters, moving quickly, looking for signs of new infusions—but while she found recent sections in the bulkhead for the two Wessex boys, Apple had been spared.

What of the dead? The Ship took them as well. From the hatch that led to the belly, Settle heard the susurrus of the dead and other things. Father had taught her how to pick locks when he started forgetting keys in his drinking, so she easily threw open the hatch door. The darkness within made her suddenly vertiginous. She uncoiled the rope ladder hooked into place around the hole, took the lantern and descended into the bilge.

Water splashed below—a foot deep. The dead rose and fell like shouting in a fog, so many of them that Settle marvelled at how long the Ship must have been stitching and re-stitching the sea with its restlessness. But in all the voices, she did not recognize Apple. He was safe from the Ship now.

Settle held the lantern up—the light reflected off the ceiling two yards above her and illuminated the surface of an ocean filling the Ship’s belly. Pegged at regular intervals around the bulkhead were small bottles taped green and blue, catching drips like the sap from a tree. In the water, she saw small coloured lumps, a false seabed of pebbles carpeting the floor. Tiny jewels—smaller than those the Monster had sported, and Settle remembered the treasure the figurehead had swallowed. She thought of seeds.

Beneath the dead chorus, there was another sound. In the ocean’s middle, the water was bubbling, spitting upwards in small fountains. Settle waded towards it, feeling the stones under her boots. Standing above the disturbance, she lowered the light.

The ground slanted down, a pocket that exited into an underwater tunnel. Opening to the sea? Perhaps a valve the Ship periodically released—but it was not the sea that was thrashing.

The light glinted off a tiny whale. A white creature that swam in restless circles, trying to free itself of a placenta that it chewed with crystal teeth and rubbed with silver-threaded fins. As Settle watched, it finally broke loose, as all its predecessors would have done, and startled her with an upward leap of freedom, before plunging down the passageway.

The water’s churning fell back. The timbers around her groaned with familiarity. Settle recognized the sound from the childbirth rooms of Spithampton’s midwife.

The dead tried to distract her afterwards, but it was too late. The Ship’s secret was hers.

The Captain warned her to hold the secret as close to her as breath, but she scoffed him, sending him back to his termite queen with a puff of scorn. He came back contrite, presenting her riches and the world, but like the souvenirs of a discarded affair, Settle rejected them. She was tired of geegaws. She wanted something new. She told him, why did she need the whey when she had the curds, and brazenly pulled apart her shirt to show him the pearls, her breasts, her pluck. Sending him away set a part of her smouldering, a part that could not be put out, a heat that stayed with her but flared each time he came back and her heart combusted.

Outside of these dreams, that fire would not leave her, and Settle had no shame in stoking the flames whenever she passed the other sailors at their chapel rest. Hunting for the wedding roast, the Ship had fastened onto the whale’s spoor. The wedding day had been named and festivities had already started. The hull was coating itself in a fine golden fur that rippled in the sun. The crew tied bells to the masts to invite every breeze to the celebrations, delirious that something had broken the long slog of their days.

Down below, the Ship’s sweats supplied a potent grog. Waiting for their next shot of electricity from an adventure, the sailors licked the timbers and reeled to songs of wedding-night bawdiness. Hazily, they all tried to give Settle predator looks now, but she hastened them on with the wild fury in her own gaze. She was not afraid of anyone taking her ship now.

Even the Judge did not look at her anymore, but for that, Settle was grateful. These days he only regarded her with a clock’s face, sadly counting down the days.

One morning, as the Ship completed a slow turn, the Judge sucked in, rubbed the air between thumb and forefinger, and said, “Whale waters.”

“Yes—and I won’t be there to enjoy the feast, will I?”

They worked on in silence. She could see that the Judge was working on a response, but it took him to the following night.

He left a wrap of supplies—tack, a water flask and a pocket compass in a warm fearnought—just outside the open door. He had no lantern, so he spoke as darkness. “One soul can man the lubber boat,” the dark said. “Track west-north-west, four nights should bring ye to the darkie coast.”

Settle took the bundle but did not yet step across the threshold. “If you’re doing this because I could have been your—” She almost said daughter. “—child, then I’ll always remember you fondly as a parent.”

The shadows coughed, then in a low voice, “I thought ye might ship and crew. Ye have spirit sparks about, an eye for adventure. I thought ye would have shown us an escape from the world’s prison. But I’ve seen the way ye’ve mooned the Captain, and I’ve seen how impatient ye are with yer own noonday and how ye want to blaze her Majesty.”

The air stirred with sighs. “No, I never wanted to save ye. I wanted to save our beauty.”

After that, it was true darkness again. Settle was alone.

She buttoned on the fearnought and prowled through the sleeping quarters until she came out on deck. A prayer of night. Slow-sucking water, only a tease of wind. The moon was away, leaving just enough glow for her to pick a way across the ropes and between the wedding streamers as the two duty crew smoked crackers and played checkers.

Settle found the lubber boat—used for shore hops—lashed to the side. She unshrouded and unbound it with little disturbance. Its sails could be unfurled quickly. She deemed that a goodly distance could be made before the alarm was raised and the Ship turned. In a bleary night, Settle might even be able to slip their sight. Would the Captain be bothered for a half-scrap, maybe-bait, an apprentice that dropped overboard?

Settle rolled the pearls against her skin and she knew, more absolutely than anything since she first knew in Spithampton that the sea was big enough to want to swallow her but her will was big enough to make it choke with trying: the Captain and the Ship would never let her go. They would hunt her just as they hunted the monsters, not simply for profit or safety, but because their desire would insist on nothing less.

And neither would hers.

She could not leave this way, a thief chased by the dawn cockerel.

The ocean below was the ocean in her dream. Thinking that oiled her to act. She crept along the starboard rim, up the foc’stle stairs, peeking above the deckline to see the Captain, just as she expected to see him—not cozy in his quarters, but out in the open. His coat was careless and empty bottles rolled in the cage of his chair legs. One of the crew had had the courage to put a blanket nearby, but not to drape him. The Captain snored with the intensity of heavy carousing pitched straight into heavy sleep.

The Judge’s bundle was generous and as much as she might hope to take on the fly, but Settle had gathered some extras on her way. The small wood knife had a blade she could nudge up with a fingernail and a curved sharpness that was long enough for what she had to do. Settle stole up to the Captain, feeling the lazy heat blazing off the fevered body.

Hundreds of faces glowered at her from below the Captain’s thin beard, hundreds more wanted to shout out warnings all down his neck, but the tattooed dead could only ripple with the Captain’s yawns. She had never seen him this close before. The fine porcelain lines cracking his face were telltale of years of obsession, but the skin had been hardened with ink and salt and wind. Still, it would yield to her knife.

One stroke and she would be free of the fear. A single cut and the temptation would be gone.

She held up the blade, outlined the bloody smile in her mind. But something about the Captain stayed her. This had not been expected—this recognition. For a moment, she felt panic that the Captain was lost family, but it was not features that caught her. Something in the way Settle herself had looked at a mirror on the Dream when she had first donned the sailor cap.

The look of a woman with a secret.

The shock nearly made her drop the knife.

The Cruel Ship’s Captain was just like—

She tried to raise the knife again.

I can’t stop myself, she thought.

Finally, she kissed the Captain on the lips.

The Captain woke and looked straight into her eyes. “Oh,” she whispered in recognition. “I know ye. It’s yer ship that’s been haunting my dreams.”

Aye, she wanted to tell her, just as ye’ve been haunting my heart.

But at that moment, the Ship screamed.

“Satan’s midden! I smell the cat on ye! Cheat on your beauty? I’ll cut the eggs out of ye! I’ll tar the shit inside ye! I’ll burn yer atoms to smoke and yer smoke to void and yer void to damnation!”

The Captain yanked Settle to her feet. The knife clattered away. What have I done? she thought as she was dragged by the Captain across the foc’stle deck.

Some of the crew were already on deck—in a minute, they all would be. “Bring me that dungbie dell,” the figurehead commanded. The Captain yanked hard on Settle’s hair and pulled her towards the bowsprit’s root.

“Facing!” the Ship demanded. “I want to smell the piss as I tell her what happens to any cockroach who dares dally with my Captain.”

With a lock grip, the Captain held Settle by her neck. She wanted to caress that hand as she dangled out over the hull, her feet barely on the deck.

She stared straight into the figurehead’s visage. A dainty smile. Rouged skin and tumbling yellow hair, barely marked by storm—it had been cared for, lovingly repaired and repainted over the years.

“I remember ye,” the Ship purred. “Ye were one of those who didn’t respect beauty.”

“Oh, I respect beauty,” Settle said, then spat into the Ship’s eye, “when I see it.”

Settle’s spit was lost in the wind. The Ship’s flat eyes twinkled with reflections from the foam below. “Then look deep, for this is the last beauty ye’ll ever see. Ugly things are all ye’ll have to look at now.”

“Not just ugly things,” Settle said.

One hand released the edge of the staysail and reached into her shirt. Settle flicked the necklace over her head and held the pearls between her and the Ship.

The Ship quivered, a spasm that almost made the Captain let her go. “What dickery is this?” the Captain whispered.

The pearls caged the moment and allowed Settle to inspect it. The feelings of all three were transparent in their light.

The ache of the Captain, who had travelled the globe for so long she had exhausted everything that could fire her heart—

The weariness of the Ship, which had birthed her own monsters and treasure to chase because there were none left in a world she had exhausted so long before—

“The final wedding gift,” the Ship sighed.

“Aye,” Settle said, loudly enough for the whole crew, “but for my wedding to the sea.”

Settle let the pearls drip through her fingers. The Ship’s groan of horror was so deep that the Captain lost her grip as well. Settle yelled as air and gravity separated her from the beautiful Captain. She floundered for a few seconds, then plunged downwards with the pearls, into the churn below. The Ship’s stem clipped her and she fell on through the water, her wits slipping, her only wish that if the great white things in the water came to her now, they would swallow her whole.

But the cold was its own shock and Settle gagged for breath and kicked away from the drag of the Cruel Ship’s passing. The tow tossed her playfully and her lungs were swollen to bursting but she kept scissoring and pulling towards the air. A huge shadow flew across her—the Ship’s rudder to her port, and then nothing, only a cloud of bubbles and a clear direction to the surface.

Settle gulped air and sea, coughed out both, took in air again, and again. When she looked up, she still wondered if the water was pulling her down again, so high was the Ship above her, the white speckle of the barnacled keel looming like a new night sky overhead. But Settle was not sinking—the Ship was rising.

There was something special about the pearls. The ship had fashioned them to break the anchor lodging it to the world, but had needed them to be discovered, won through adventure, prised from danger. And now, as they touched the sea, mixing with the medium in which the ship had vested its hopes, a miraculous reaction occurred. The pearls were still falling slowly through the air, vanishing into smaller and smaller winks in the world. But they were ascending too, up into the constellations, expanding in larger and larger globes until they sparkled in the night sky. All were joined in a single silver loop, a bright band of marvel that led to new worlds, inside and outside of this one.

The Captain held tight to the figurehead. “Where do ye want for yer honeymoon, my love, the foam or the void?” he cried out.

And she answered, “The stars!” and the crew cheered in approval.

The Ship snatched a wind hidden in the world. The sails blossomed out. The compass called out new directions. The Ship floated into the sky, tacking once before she pierced the low cloud floors. The band of pearls became a river and the Ship sped upwards, disappearing with a storm flash, another twinkle in the heavens.

When the sunspots cleared from her vision, Settle could not see the band anymore. The Captain was gone and she was alone in the sea.

But she knew the sea would not have her for long.

Within minutes, it glided towards her—the dark shadow of a wave thickening into a vessel, a sleek skulk across the water. A twenty-foot barque, a barbed anchor, its three masts supporting black sheets, the whole ghastly craft preceded by the fearsome figurehead of Poseidon. It scattered dread before it. It was her Ship.

A rope ladder over the edge invited her. She searched the ship—there was plenty of store, but the only trace of her Captain was the sneer on Poseidon’s face. It was the one sign that her ship had been concealed in the Captain’s dreams. Long Preston had said, stash a ship in the dreams of your true desire. Settle could not have named her true desire at the moment she chose to act, but her heart had known how and when to make the offering. Perhaps if the Captain had known Settle was invading her dreams, perhaps if Settle had been greeted the way that she had greeted Apple, Settle could have hidden not just her ship, but herself as well, the way she had hidden her boy. It mattered little. Her Captain was chasing meteors now with dreams that had no further place for Settle’s ship.

Apple. She would need help to sail this. Settle smiled to herself, closed her eyes. Within five minutes, Apple came forth and made her ship a fleet.

“My love!” he halloo-ed.

“My crew,” she commanded and Apple bowed his head.

But she would need more to pursue her new desires. When Apple’s schooner had been digested, they set a course for better-travelled waters to recruit a fitting crew for a cruel ship.

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Reasoning about the Body

Ted Chiang

Originally delivered as the Guest of Honor speech at Congrès Boréal in Quebec City, May 2010.

I’m here to talk about science fiction, but I want to begin by describing an idea that anthropologists use, called “folk biology.” Folk biology consists of naïve ideas about the biological world. For example, people used to think whales were giant fish because they have no legs and they live in the oceans. Then we learned that whales breathe air and have warm blood, so we realized that it makes more sense to classify whales as mammals. Another example is thinking of spiders as insects, because they look sort of like insects. But if you look more closely at spiders, you notice that they have eight legs instead of six, and they have two body segments instead of three, so it makes more sense to put them in a separate category.

Folk biology is interesting to anthropologists because misconceptions like thinking spiders are insects are not universal. They vary from one culture to another, and anthropologists can learn things about a culture by the way they think about the biological world. Folk biology is also interesting to psychologists because studying children’s ideas about the natural world gives us some insight into how our cognitive skills develop as we mature.

As for me, once I read about folk biology, I started to see examples of it everywhere; even when we are scientifically literate, we engage in folk biology on a regular basis, without being aware of it.

Let me offer some examples of what I’m talking about. At various points in history, people have said that if you wanted a strong body, you should eat meat instead of bread or potatoes. There have been all sorts of justifications for this, but one of them—even when it wasn’t explicitly stated—was the belief that you literally are what you eat. Eating muscles would make your body muscular, while eating soft and starchy foods would make your body soft and starchy. When people advise you to trim the visible fat from meat, they are implicitly using a similar argument: that the layer of fat on your steak will translate into a layer of fat on your body. Part of the skepticism about the Atkins diet was rooted in this; how could you lose weight without reducing your fat intake?

There’s an obvious flaw in this line of reasoning, which is that cows eat grass but beef isn’t anything like grass. Cows are able to create bones and muscles and fat without eating any of those things, and humans can do the same. There are some competitive bodybuilders who are vegetarians. And the Atkins diet does seem to work; you can lose weight even with a diet high in fat. But the idea that what you eat translates directly into your body is still appealing to us; it’s easy to believe, it makes sense at an intuitive level, it’s something a child could understand. That is folk biology in action.

Doctors aren’t immune to this, either. For years doctors recommended that we limit our consumption of eggs because eggs are high in cholesterol, as a way of reducing the level of cholesterol in our blood. But more recent studies have shown that this doesn’t actually work. Our bodies make cholesterol out of saturated fats, so you can have high blood cholesterol even if your diet contains no cholesterol at all. But the reason that doctors told us to eat fewer eggs was that, at some level, they still believed that you literally are what you eat. They were engaging in a kind of folk biology.

Now, it’s true that some of what happens in our bodies can be understood in a simple mechanical way. But that fools us into thinking that everything in our bodies can be understood in the same way, which is what gets us into trouble. Because the reality is a lot of what goes on in our bodies is opaque. A lot of biology is highly non-intuitive, and can’t be understood by making analogies with mechanical systems.

Let me give one more example. We have blood flowing through our circulatory system. And when you’ve lost a lot of blood, replacing the missing fluid with someone else’s blood can save your life. That makes sense, intuitively. If your car’s engine is running low on motor oil or brake fluid, you can add a quart and get it working again. However, you cannot simply take blood out of one person and put it into another person arbitrarily. Doctors have tried that, and it didn’t work. It turns out that people have different blood types, and they aren’t compatible. And it’s not even the case that you can only transfuse blood between people with the same blood type; it’s actually more complicated than that. To understand who can donate blood and who can receive it, you need the concepts of antigens and antibodies, which are not at all obvious; these are not concepts that a child could understand. And this is my point: you cannot think of blood as a simple fluid like motor oil or brake fluid. You cannot use mechanical intuition when thinking about the human body.

Now, the example of folk biology that I really want to talk about is a little different, and it might take me a while to convince you that it’s folk biology at all: it is the idea that the brain is a computer. People routinely refer to the brain as a kind of computer, both in science fiction and outside of it. People have been doing this ever since computers were invented. You might almost get the impression that when we invented the computer, we finally understood what the brain really was. But that isn’t the case at all.

As many observers have noted, we always talk about the brain in terms of the most complex technology that’s available. In the Renaissance, philosophers talked about the brain as if it were a kind of ingenious clockwork mechanism. Freud talked about the brain as if it were a kind of steam engine, with pressures building up and needing to be released to prevent an explosion. In the 1940s, schoolchildren were taught that the brain was like a telephone switchboard. Nowadays, computers are the most complicated machines most people are familiar with, and so we compare the brain to them.

But that doesn’t mean that the current metaphor is correct while the previous metaphors were incorrect. The brain is not substantially more like a computer than it’s like a steam engine. And when we compare the brain to a computer, we’re saying more about our relationship to computers than we’re saying about the brain. Earlier I mentioned that anthropologists can deduce things about a culture by studying their folk-biology beliefs. The fact that we think about the brain as if it were a computer reveals something about our culture. It indicates that technology has so thoroughly saturated our world that we think of our very selves in technological terms.

We see this in science fiction more than anywhere else. Again and again, I read science-fiction stories whose premise is that the mind is software running on the brain’s hardware. The story might not state this explicitly, but at this point stories don’t have to; they can use it as a default assumption, and expect the reader to understand. It’s accepted as a convention. It’s so commonplace that it’s easy to forget that the distinction between hardware and software does not exist in biology. The brain is an organ in the same way that the liver and the pancreas are organs, and we don’t think about those in terms of hardware and software.

You may ask, if the computer isn’t a good metaphor for the brain, what is a better one? I don’t know; I don’t have a truly accurate metaphor to offer. The brain is more complex than anything else we know of, so there’s nothing else that we can compare it to that fully conveys its complexity. And that makes it hard to talk about the brain. One of the ways we understand new ideas is by comparing them to things we’re already familiar with, so it’s inevitable that we will use metaphors when trying to understand the brain. There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. The problem is when we take the metaphor too far. When people thought about blood as a simple fluid that could be transfused between individuals, they were overestimating the applicability of their knowledge of mechanical systems. When we think of the brain as a computer, we’re doing the same thing: overestimating the applicability of our knowledge of computers.

The most egregious example of this is idea of the singularity, which is pretty explicit in equating the brain to a computer; singularity believers routinely assert that computing power is equivalent to intelligence, and that a computer capable of performing a certain number of operations per second would be equivalent to the human brain. This, I think, is going further with our technological metaphors than we ever have before. I’m not aware of people engaging in similar speculation when they talked about the brain using the language of steam engines; did anyone suggest that a steam engine containing a certain number of cylinders would be equivalent to the human brain? I don’t know, but I think one idea makes about as much sense as the other.

By the way, I’m not claiming that consciousness can only occur in organic tissue. I believe that Strong AI is possible, meaning that I think it’s entirely possible for computers to be self-aware in the same way that human beings are. I just think it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. The misconception that brains are just like computers makes people think that Strong AI will be easy.

I should also acknowledge that I don’t think this misconception that the brain is like a computer is impeding real scientific progress. It’s only people who don’t work in neuroscience that have fallen for this misconception; actual neuroscientists know better. What I’m concerned about is the way this misconception is limiting our imaginations, particularly in science fiction.

Now I’m going to rant a little bit about some of the science-fiction tropes that bother me because of they way they equate the brain with computer technology. The first one is the trope of uploading a person into a computer just by scanning their brain. So many stories depict this as being a simple procedure, but I’d say it is next to impossible. Here’s why:

When engineers examine a sample of a material to measure its physical properties, they make a distinction between destructive testing and non-destructive testing. Destructive testing means that the sample is rendered unusable by the test; for example, you test a material’s tensile strength by actually pulling it apart. Non-destructive testing means you perform some kind of examination that doesn’t damage the sample. For example, sometimes you can x-ray a weld and look for cracks that way.

When it comes to medicine, we have some non-destructive tests, like x-rays or ultrasound or MRIs. But the vast majority of tests are actually destructive. When the doctors take a blood sample to run some tests, they use that blood up; it’s gone, you can’t get it back. And think about all the conditions that require a blood test instead of an x-ray. Doctors can’t even tell if your kidney have stopped working without taking a blood sample. How likely is it that we’ll be able to read a person’s memories with less intrusive technology? That implies that your memories lie closer to the surface of your body than the fact that you’re in renal failure. I would not say that renal failure is a subtle condition; it affects every drop of your blood, and yet we need destructive testing to diagnose it. Your memories are not printed on your skin like ink on a page, where they can be read by simple inspection. Your memories are extremely subtle, and deeply embedded in your brain, so the idea that we can read those with a non-destructive test is, I think, ludicrous. It might be possible one day to scan all of a person’s memories into a computer, but I’ll bet you that the process will be destructive. The person will be nothing but a cloud of pink mist by the time the scan is done.

Then there’s the idea that we can download new memories or skills, or even a whole new personality, into someone’s brain. We’ve seen this in movies like The Matrix and television series like Dollhouse, but there’s also plenty of written science fiction that assumes this is the next logical step after the ability to read memories is achieved. This drives me crazy. Even if scanning memories were easy, it doesn’t follow that you’d be able to write memories into the brain. This idea is purely a result of our familiarity with computers; as soon as you stop thinking in terms of computers, you realize how little sense it makes.

For example, let’s consider photographs. You can lay a photograph down on the glass plate of your Hewlett-Packard or Epson scanner, and it will read it down to a level of detail that is invisible to the naked eye. Photographs are just about the easiest things in the world to scan; everything that’s interesting about them lies on the surface, rather than on deeper layers. But do I expect that the next generation of scanner will let you change the imagery on the photos you laid down on the glass? Of course not, and it’s not because I lack faith in the ingenuity of Hewlett-Packard or Epson. It’s because rewritability depends on the material that the original photos were printed on, and that’s not something the makers of scanning machines have any control over. If we started printing photos on special paper using erasable ink, maybe we could have scanners that could rewrite those photos as easily as they scanned them. But our old Polaroids weren’t designed to be rewriteable, so your flatbed scanner is never going to be able to rewrite them.

If we move away from photos and back into the realm of biology, rewritability becomes even more difficult. Do you think we’ll be able to take an ultrasound of your failing kidneys, edit the image to one of a healthy kidney, and save the changes back into your body? Do you think we’ll have an x-ray machine that will let the doctor repair fractures using a mouse cursor, and then overwrite your broken bone with the intact bone? No, of course not. So why do we see so many stories in which it’s possible to do this to your brain? It’s because we’ve been seduced by the idea that the brain is a computer. We accept those stories because we are still engaging in folk biology.

Okay, that’s enough ranting. You may say, we don’t actually believe that what those stories describe is possible, we’re practicing suspension of disbelief when we read them. That’s true, although I don’t think most readers put memory uploading or downloading in the same category as, say, faster-than-light travel; I think a lot of readers imagine that some of those brain technologies are coming in the relatively near future. But the more general point is that science fiction doesn’t have to be scientifically accurate to be interesting or worthwhile, and I absolutely agree with that.

One of the ways a speculation can be interesting, even if it’s not scientifically accurate, is if it raises philosophical questions. And the idea that the brain is a computer can be interesting in that regard; it lets you examine questions about free will and the material basis of consciousness. In a similar vein, the idea that the mind can be treated like software offers an interesting metaphor for the ways workers are dehumanized and commodified by modern society. But a lot of that territory is well explored by now, and most current stories that treat brains as computers are not trying to break new ground in that regard.

Perhaps the biggest reason we enjoy speculations in science fiction is for their strangeness, the sense of wonder they provoke. This, I think, is where the idea of the brain as a computer really falls short. Because nowadays it is anything but strange; it is commonplace. So, in a way, my complaint about this fallacy is really just a specific version of a very common complaint about science fiction: that so much of it is familiar instead of mind-expanding. This is why it bothered me when I realized that thinking of the brain as a computer is a kind of folk biology. Because science fiction should challenge us, and folk biology is not challenging. Folk biology cannot be challenging, by its very nature, because it reflects our intuition. Science fiction should not reinforce naïve ideas about how the world works.

Now, I realize that this is subjective: not everyone agrees on what’s strange or challenging. An idea that seems strange to me might seem perfectly ordinary to you, and vice versa. So let me give you an example of a property of the brain that something I find strange.

There is a memorization technique known as the “memory palace.” This is a method for remembering things that’s been used in various forms for thousands of years; you may have read about it in John Crowley’s novels Little, Big and Ægypt. The idea is to think of a building that you know so well you can walk through it in your mind and picture the decorations in each and every room. To memorize facts like names or numbers, you construct scenes that represent those facts; the more outrageous the scene is, the better. One example I recently read is that, if you want to remember the number 124, you could picture a spear cutting a swan into four pieces, because the spear looks like the number one, the swan looks like the number two, and the four pieces represents the number four. You’d picture this gruesome scene within one room of your memory palace. Then, when you need to recall that number, you mentally walk to that room, see a swan being cut into four pieces, and remember the number 124.

I once asked John Crowley if he used the memory-palace technique himself, and he said, no, he couldn’t see how it could possibly work in practice. This was a relief to me, because I had the exact same reaction when I read about it. But the fact is that people have used it with enormous success. People used it in ancient times, when parchment was so expensive that you couldn’t readily write things down. Memory artists today use a version of this technique. So even though I find it a completely bizarre concept, I have to assume that it actually works.

There are a number of things about this that are worth noting. One is that this is absolutely nothing like the way a computer’s memory works. Thinking about the brain as a computer does not help us understand why the memory-palace technique is effective; neither does thinking about the brain as a telephone switchboard, or a steam engine, or a clock. If we ever come up with a metaphor for the brain that helps us understand why the memory-palace technique works, then I think we’ll really be getting somewhere.

Another thing worth noting is that the memory-palace technique was developed before we had mechanical aids to memory. Many people have observed that the widespread use of writing reduced our reliance on our memories, but I think it had another, subtler effect. It started changing the way we think about our minds. Once people had seen a library of books, they could imagine their own memory as being like a library of books. And once people started doing that, they had taken the first step toward thinking about the brain as a technological device. And that makes me wonder, if we were all using the memory-palace technique, would we have come up with different metaphors for understanding the brain?

Earlier I mentioned that early attempts at blood transfusion failed because we didn’t know about blood types. Has there been a similar mistake made because we used folk biology when thinking about the brain? Yes, I think there has been: the belief that repressed memories can be recovered via hypnosis. I don’t mean to deny that it’s possible for a person to repress memories, but I believe many people have been unjustly accused of crimes on the basis of so-called recovered memories. I think the implicit assumption underlying the idea of recovered memory is that our brain is some kind of mechanical recording device, like a camera or a tape recorder. Because if you think that brains act like cameras or tape recorders, you’re likely to believe that an objective account of events is recorded somewhere in your brain. Even if you can’t immediately access it, you imagine that an accurate memory is there.

However, it turns out that it’s easy to implant false memories. You don’t need hypnosis to do it; you can just ask some leading questions and make someone think they saw all sorts of things they didn’t see. Some psychologists believe eyewitness identifications shouldn’t be used in court because of their unreliability. Our memories are so inaccurate that they are pretty much the opposite of cameras or tape recorders. And I wonder, if we were all using the memory palace technique, would we have been more skeptical of memories recovered by hypnosis? This is purely speculation on my part, but I feel like the memory-palace technique makes it clearer that memories can be based on your imagination just as much as your sensory impressions.

Anyway, the reason I brought up the memory-palace technique is that I find it astonishing. Maybe it seems ordinary to you, but it feels much stranger to me than thinking about the brain as a computer, and I’d like to read a science-fiction story about the brain that has the same effect. Maybe that would require writers to come up with a new metaphor for the brain, but maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t ask that this story reflect the latest research in neuroscience; I just want it to talk about the brain in a way that I haven’t seen a hundred times before.

I think science fiction has reached the point where it’d actually be more interesting for a story to explore the ways that the brain isn’t like a computer. Even comparing the brain to a steam engine might be preferable, if it helps readers realize that the computer metaphor is just a product of our times.

As I said before, science fiction doesn’t have to be scientifically accurate. But there are some things I want science fiction to have in common with science. Science is about examining your assumptions and not simply relying on common sense about the way the universe works. I think science fiction should do the same. And that’s why I think we should be on the lookout for folk biology in science fiction, and avoid it when we can. Because folk biology confirms what you already think you know, and we should ask more of science fiction than that.

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Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders’ Flash Fever

Patty Houston

It’s true, I’m a little dizzy, but not falling over; not that I’m whining: where would that get me?—in the Toxicologist’s office, that’s where, so I recite, “When welding’s lethal, use asbestos-free electrodes.”

I’m crouching, sparks flying, the glow of super heat lighting up the space around me, wondering if a study nurse will stop by. Up to now, no nurse has donned a mask and sampled the fumes. Aida Blue’s having sudden freezing spells and threatening to call the Reverend Francine, Angel Communicator, which is against study rules and, well, frankly, worries me.

“Howard,” Aida says during a thaw, “I don’t so much mind the manganese in the air, but I might’ve caught a neurodegenerative disease.”

How am I supposed to feel about that? Aida’s ailing scares me. Though what she truly believes is that her stiff arms and legs are passing and that by guinea pigging we’re not only getting paid plenty, we’re also helping all welders all over. I hope she’s right. Because this study’s a lung-buster. Every day we enter the shed, put on our personal protective gear, our ppg (steel-toe boots, skullcaps, stout jeans, gauntlet gloves, goggles, hoods with the two-color lenses, earplugs) and doctor race cars: Barracudas, Mustangs, Firebirds, that variety, with monikers like Banshee, Belly Up, Burn in Hell.

At least our shed has a fume extractor, which is better than others. Some welders catch metal fever from breathing the mist of vaporized lead, nickel, chromium. Before Aida incurred gait disturbances, before she lost the knack of her ultraviolet welding smile, we’d visit the Alaska Pipeline shed for fish fries. Best grilled salmon this side of Wind Gap, Kentucky. There was Lamar and Rastas. Lamar had a crush on Darlene, an artist who sculpted Foo Dogs from bronze; one Foo’s foot rested on the world, another’s foot on the belly of a baby Foo to stand for protection. But those sentinels slept on the job because fumes brought on welder’s flash, and the Alaska Pipeliners, their brain signals gone haywire, had zappers implanted by the Toxicologist’s team. Now they’re kaput. But where? “ECU,” Darlene says, “Eternal Care Unit.” After Lamar’s termination, she abandoned her fiery art, and I can’t sleep at night for fretting I’ll go to the shed and find no fume extractor.

Today I go to the shed and there’s no fume extractor. In its place is a Post-it:

Don’t get your stout jeans in a wad. The fume extractor’s coming back. Keep your pants on.

Here’s our predicament: how are we supposed to breathe while torching the innards of a Pinto—Up in Smoke—?

Aida shuffles over from the women’s trailer, a welding rod stuttering in her hand.

“Is the extractor missing?” she says.

“It’s right in front of you,” I say.

“My foot,” she says. “I’m calling the Reverend Francine.”

I put on my gauntlet gloves and hand her a pair.

“Why are you wearing those?” she says. “Is your helmet next? Is this some sort of ritual to appease the great Toxicologist? What would we do on a real job if there wasn’t a fume extractor? We’d strike. Where the hell’s that extractor?”

I shuck my gloves and toss them on the floor beside a Vega, Snuff You Out. “Maybe they replaced it with personal respirators,” I say. I check. Nothing.

“Son of a gun,” Aida says. “I’m going to see the Toxicologist and tell him no fume extractor, no welding.”

Scratch that. We both know she won’t. Instead she calls the Reverend and leaves a message then hands over a skull cap to duct tape over my nose and mouth. We both flip down the viewers on our masks and light our torches.

No study nurse stops in, no fume extractor shows up, and pretty soon manganese is punching us in the lungs, which starts Aida coughing till she can’t stop; I get chills and feel queasy. But we keep welding until our corpus callosums seize up.

Aida peels off her ppg and heads for the women’s trailer, her shoulders jerking with each step. “No extractor tomorrow, I vamoose,” she chokes out. “They can’t stop me. You’ll see.”

So many hot rods have to be welded each day so after I square-butt the front suspension on a Bonneville, Buzzard Bait, I finish off Aida’s chassis with a passel of horizontal lap-joints.

In the men’s trailer I wrap myself in two blankets, boil some water for instant decaf then fill out my End-of-the-Workday Medical Report:

While breathing in welding smoke today, did you notice any short-term physical effects? No.

Are there any long-term effects you are beginning to observe in yourself or your co-worker? None.

Is there anything you would like to report to the Toxicologist? Negative.

I click submit and email the report.

In the morning, the fume extractor has not been replaced and there are no individual respirators either. Yesterday’s Post-it is still stuck up. Aida leans against a Nova, Death Rattle, finishing her coffee, each swallow a major workout for her, then she shakes out her filthy skull cap so I beat my filthy cap, too. But we don’t tape them on; we wait.

No study nurse anywhere so Aida phones the Angel Communicator and leaves a message.

Que sera, sera.

An hour goes by before we put on our ppg. Today, using the fusion-only double-butt on a Plymouth, Dirge, we set the current too low for penetration. When Aida turns the juice up, spatter burns our hair since our skullcaps are on our faces; in the moment before the spray lands, Aida strikes me as a wonder, like a bottle rocket, a Roman candle.

She runs a hand through her singed locks and, as she hobbles back to the women’s trailer, I hear her leave another message for the Reverend. I adjust the current to a medium hiss and work on the day’s double-butts until every muscle convulses.

Back in the men’s trailer I rub myself with Ben Gay, head to foot, and make some decaf. On the End-of-the-Workday Medical Report, I type No, None, Negative, click submit.

The next day, the fume extractor’s in the shed. A new Post-it’s stuck up:

Didn’t mean to drown you in inert gasses. But if you’re feeling feeble, we’ve got cutting edge deep brain stimulation. Free. Happy welding!

I turn on the fume extractor. Aida quakes in, sighs when she sees the extractor, shakes out her skull cap, puts it on her head then tugs on the rest of her ppg. She does not once mention the Reverend Francine.

In the afternoon, I high-speed butt-weld window brackets on an Olds, On Ice, and Aida does the same with its seatbelts. When I take a coffee break, Aida finishes all the window brackets. Her way of saying thank you—I always cc her my reports.

No study nurse shows up.

Back when we first started this study, the Reverend Francine, Angel Communicator, made a shed visit.

“The air in here is fetid,” she said.

“That’s the manganese,” Aida said.

“You called?” the Rev said.

“For angel guidance,” Aida said.

First, the Reverend Francine placed her fingertips between her eyes, next her crown, then the back of her head. Pointing one finger, she drew a line connecting the three points to form a triangle. Last, she found a spot above each ear and rested her fingertips there.

“My inner telephone’s ready,” she said.

“I really need the money from this study,” Aida said. “And, sure, I want medical breakthroughs for us welders, but the treatment, if I end up needing it, petrifies me. Should I stay or quit?”

The Rev closed her eyes and placed her fingertips on her Adam’s apple. From throat to ears, she vibrated for a minute before she said, “Angelic vacuum cleaner.”

“Say what?” Aida said.

Eyes still closed, the Rev said, “Visualize angels floating above your head holding vacuum cleaners, suctioning up all the vitriol in here. Aim the nozzle at your body, your mind, your feelings, whatever needs cleaning.”

Aida hummed like a Hoover.

“May the angels watch over you,” the Rev said and left.

“That oughta keep Uriel and Raphael busy,” I said.

“Hmmm-mmm,” Aida said.

“No outside intervention allowed,” I said, then I went to the men’s trailer and submitted my Workday Medical Report: No, None, Negative.

Today’s the day I replenish our welding supplies, for which I’m compensated mucho bucks a month, plus I get away from the shed and the trailer for a change of scenery. When I go to the shed to take inventory, Aida’s in there still Hoovering and walking as if she’s in a trance. I jot down a list.

“Are you restocking supplies?” she asks. “Can you bring me back a bottle of wine? For medical purposes.”

“Yes,” I say. Many bottles. For love purposes, I channel to her.

I’m very fond of Aida. Even though boyfriend-girlfriend liaisons are against regulations. How could I stop myself from falling for a woman who’s not only an arc stunner with the double butt and joint welds, in both the horizontal and the vertical positions, this rascal also telephones angels! Aida says ours is a spiritual friendship. To which I say, Caught on fire! In time, I’ll merge, unite, weld myself to her, I know I will.

Aida Blue’s thirty and has perfect posture, if a bit inflexible; grey pops up in her dark hair like arc strikes; her rich voice sounds smoky and she smells of cilantro; tucked into her stout jeans, tight as a burrito, I can’t keep from noticing her wrinkled crotch, her dungaree-swathed labia. One ogle gets me whistling, “What’s new pussycat? Mee-eee-eee-eee-eee-ooowww!” At times, to stretch out her wine, she spikes it with water—kink-ky. Of course, booze is prohibited on the study, and so is vitamin E, brain shield, but here’s my credo: Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

Off I go to the welding supplies store, my list in hand, keys to my ride, a golf cart, jingling in my pocket. I burn rubber half a mile down a back road to the Aluminum Plate. Wally’s behind the counter. I hand over my list and while he gathers the equipment, he says, “You hear about Darlene, the Foo Dog sculptor? You know her?”

“Sure,” I say. I know Darlene from the Alaskan Pipeline fish fries.

“Well, they gave her the treatment. I saw her after the implant. A zombie.

“She’d started sculpting again, pot-bellied Hotei, some god of good fortune. Fat lotta good. Anyway, one day the study nurse visited her shed and observed that Darlene’s epicranial twitched. Darlene told her it wasn’t anything Botox couldn’t paralyze, but the study nurse said, ‘Posh!’ Next day, they zapped her.

“What I think is, those knife-happy neuro-

surgeons want their recipe approved pronto, but you study guys and gals don’t fizzle out fast enough. What do ya think about that?”

“I dunno,” I say.

Wally pushes a carton across the counter. “Have a nice day,” he says.

It’s creepy about Darlene. Also it’s distressing. Because sculpting Hotei is welding-tofu, welding-light compared to the jalopy autopsies Aida and I do.

I floor it to the Spirit Shop and buy a box of Liebfraumilch that’s big as a Buick battery then peel out until I find a remote spot surrounded by old elms, funnel in some wheat germ oil and suck the stuff straight from the spout. Back in the shed, I write “safety goggles” across the bag the wine’s shrouded in and set it on the workbench.

The next day, the fume extractor is in the shed and two new skull caps. A row of Post-its are stuck up. They say:

Please accept these skull caps as an expression of our vested interest in your safety. Your weldfare (!!) is our utmost concern. But remember, you signed on this study to get treated for disorderly neuron firings from fastening pieces of metal together. And so we can get our investigational remedy out of the lab and into sick welders the world over. It’s a laudable sacrifice you make and meritorious service you give to flash fever sufferers everywhere—today, tomorrow, forever.

Which goes to show that Wally knew what he was talking about.

“No way they’re ever deep frying my brain,” says Aida. Her voice is pared down, weak and wavy. “If my ex wins in court, I’m looking at ten years of child support.” She phones the Reverend Francine.

Ohh … kayyy.

We spend the whole day on a Camaro frame—Last Roundup—bending, fitting, brazing, keeping a steady blood-red 1300 degrees, doing a slow roast.

At night, too sweaty and grimy to enjoy our beefed-up Liebfraumilch, we return to our separate trailers. There’s an email from Dad.

Eyes getting worse, he says. Blisters ruptured like hot salt rubbed into each baby blue, so I applied raw potatoes. How should I know vegetables contain infectious bacteria? Cure super expensive. How’s the study going? Any way to earn bonus pay?

Will inquire, I reply. How’s Larry?

Barks a lot. Can’t see to scoop his poop. Neighbors mad. Fines piling up. How’re you?

Homesick, I reply.

Dad’s fifty-something. The week before I signed up for the study, he looked at his arc with a number eight dark lens, mistaking it for a number fourteen, and burned his eyes like a sunburn on the skin. The lubricant drops his doctor prescribed were soothing until blisters swelled up on his eyeballs. Mostly he’s okay, except for the scar tissue that causes blindness.

Why raw potatoes? Why not cold cloths?

Next morning a study doctor, meaty Parker Pinkley is in the shed and offers to take me out for coffee.

Upstart. Vexer.

“I like coffee, too,” says Aida.

“Boy talk,” Pinkley says. “Boy-girl talk next time.”

He red lines his golf cart to the back of the parking lot and lets it idle.

“You’ll be getting an extra check this week,” he says as he pours coffee from a thermos and passes a styrofoam cup to me. “Overtime pay.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“The money’s for picking up Aida’s slack. How is Aida? Any symptoms? Tremors? Impaired reflexes? You’re actually helping her by telling me.”

I’m not about to steer into that skid since, for weeks, Aida’s been ranting about Ex, her former welder-husband who used to wear tee-shirts on the job and won a Darwin Award after infrared exposure caused severe gastritis and poor sperm quality. Now that he’s a stay-at-home dad for their son Thad, he wants a divorce and custody with alimony on top.

“Nein,” I say. “Aida’s good.”

“And pigs fly,” he says. “You’d probably drool over the Emperor’s new clothes, too. I read your reports, yet Aida leaves the shed early while you stay late. Also, scuttlebutt has it the notorious Reverend Francine’s been here making long distance calls to glory.”

I pour powdered milk into my cup, stir.

“I get it,” he says, “you fancy her. You only want what’s best for her. What if what’s best for her is to let us deliver electrical jolts and cure every primary and secondary symptom she has? For grant funds to continue, for participants to get paid, we must implant wires inside brains. And our vibes tell us Aida’s ripe for treatment.

“You do want our pioneering work to press on, right? Of course you do. And the bonus bucks will keep on, too. Just verify our hunch about Aida. Soon. On your next report.”

He unscrews a bottle of flavoring, nougat, and tips the neck in my direction.

“Please,” I say.

He fills my cup till the thick syrup runneth over.

In the shed, Aida sips Liebfraumilch laced with E. “What did peckerhead want?’ she says. “Are you getting the stimulator?”

“No.”

“Did he ask you on another date? Even though he’s married!? Does he believe in plural marriage?”

“No.”

“Does he want to ask me on a date? A subterranean medulla oblongata date? Does he suspect?”

I say nothing.

“That dick breath scum face!” she says.

“Pinkley says informers saw you leaving the shed early and getting visits from the Rev. He wants me to report you so the team can mend your upper story basal ganglia.”

I tap the box wine spout.

“Time to call the Angel Communicator,” she says.

We clink Liebfraumilchs, grazing each other’s rough welder’s hands. I go to hug her. She sees me coming and totters away.

Next day, I go to the shed and find no fume extractor. No Post-it.

Aida wobbles in looking withered as a peach stone. “The mirrors in my trailer are the worst quality,” she says, and flicks the Liebfraumilch spout.

I follow suit.

“The Reverend Francine’s coming,” she says. Her voice sounds chapped.

All morning we lap-joint turbocharger brackets. In the afternoon we weld exhaust systems until Aida’s quivers speed up and she stops to rest.

No study nurse comes in.

About an hour before the end of our shift, we hear pounding on our door as if a refugee’s out there. In walks a welder, in full ppg; he heads for the back of our shed and whisks off his mask. It’s the Reverend Francine.

After the Rev adjusts her transmitter, after she moves her fingers to her Adam’s apple, ears and throat for internal receiving, she tells Aida, “Sorry, wrong number” a few times before, at last, she claps her hands and says, “Ah yes, good. Fire release.” Next, the Rev pulls from her pocket a pen, paper and a pair of metal tongs. She has Aida write down her dilemma then twists the paper into a taper, which she clamps with the tongs and tells Aida to ignite with her arc. As the paper burns, the Rev says, “Ask the angels of fire to purify your mind, body and emotions of your pickle and release you from it. Now drop the charred paper into that mug of Liebfraumilch.”

That night I email my report: No, None, Negative.

That same night, I get another email from Dad.

Bad news, he says. Tried some “get the red out” and burned my eyes worse. Doc says I need the red in for more blood flow and oxygen. Doc says crying helps. I’m a grown welder! What’s Doc been shootin up? Braille starts soon as I pay the deposit. Not cheap. Also, somebody bumped off Larry. That’s okay by me since I need a seeing eye dog on the double! Last week! Don’t reply till I get voice-mail on your computer. Downpayment’s a thou.

In bed, I can’t sleep so I recite the list of secondary symptoms: depression, dementia, decreased motor skills, memory loss. Forgetting sounds good to me. Worrying about Dad, Aida, Larry won’t cure the sick or revive the dead.

My responsibility is to keep my cash flow positive, keep my arc burning bright, keep my fume intake to a minimum. Getting depressed about bills could cause a decrease in my welding skills, which could affect my cash flow negatively, especially if the study nurse ever shows up.

I continue to recite the secondary symptoms, but as I do, I write each malady on a piece of paper that I twist into a taper for burning to ash in the morning, all except memory loss, a symptom I hold dear, like a gift, like a treatment that works.

Next day is the day I order supplies from Wally. I go to the shed to make a list.

“About the Reverend Francine yesterday,” Aida says, “wasn’t she incendiary? You don’t think any observers saw through her disguise, do you?” Her oaky voice is back, giving me the shivers.

“Nah,” I say, then I arc my malady list, ask the angels for purification and instantly feel a flash of relief.

I squeal the golf cart to the Aluminum Plate. Wally’s behind the counter and looks up when I walk in. “I heard everybody in aerobatic airplane repairs got treated,” he says. “That’s four welders zapped, zombied, zeroed, every one.”

In the Spirit Shop, I stock up on half a dozen boxes of Liebfraumilch, each the size of a Jag twelve-cylinder. I gun it to my remote spot surrounded by old elms, slosh in soy, bran and lima bean oils and suck the goo straight from the spout.

Back in the shed, I write “gauntlet gloves” across the sacks I bury the wine in and set them on the workbench.

At night, thumping noises come from the women’s trailer—it has to be Aida, she’s the only female still living there. Another bump and then a wail. The wailing gets louder followed by a crash; possibly her difficulty negotiating turns has progressed to ramming into walls.

I knock on her door, but she says she’s fine.

I can’t sleep so I phone Dad.

“How’s your vision?” I ask.

“Completely lost,” he says. “I’m part mole. Other than that, I’m good, except, well, I need cash for Braille, plus glass eyes. Patches, dark glasses are passé in blind world.”

“I’ll call you in two days,” I say.

From Aida’s trailer comes more wailing, crashing, ramming.

In the morning, there’s no fume extractor, but there is a Post-it from Aida.

Had to leave for a while. The Reverend Francine experienced muscle rigidity after her last visit. Who’d have guessed? I’m at the clinic raising an angelic umbrella over her to ward off paralysis. Then to the lawyers’ to fight Ex for custody. Cover for me, will ya? This one last time? If the study nurse comes in, say I’m on sick leave—ha ha.

I tie my skullcap over my nose and mouth and spend half a day tee-jointing the roll-cage on a Gran Torino, Terminate You. In the afternoon, the door to the shed opens. It’s Aida looking like a sleepwalker with watery puffy eyes. She’s wearing an ankle-length moo-moo hoodie. A cloak? Under one arm is a brass cylinder.

Aida in meditation attire in the shed? No ppg?

“It’s final,” she says in a new voice as if she has a cleft palate. “My ex got custody of Thad, I got every other Saturday. I also got this.” She holds up the cylinder.

“Those ex’s,” I say.

She sets the cylinder on the workbench, finds a fresh box of medicated Liebfraumilch, squirts a long stream of the stuff and offers me the nozzle.

“Later,” I say as she gulps down what’s in her mouth and releases a fresh flow.

While I finish welding the engine mount I’d been working on, Aida fastens the cylinder to the shed wall. “The Rev told me this spinning prayer wheel sends blessings in the ten directions.”

“Ten?” I say. But Aida has passed out.

I bunch a pair of coveralls under her head for a pillow and send her weld messages, Let’s be rabbits. Your hutch or mine? though she’s deaf to my love telepathy. I plant a kiss on her dusty cheek then get to work clearing the shed of every mount on the schedule for today.

In vocational school, my best pal Zubin turned into a letch, a compulsive butt-squeezer. The beauty school girls complained so the principal threatened to expel my friend. On a Friday I invited Zubin over for a box of therapeutic Liebfraumilch. Halfway through the carton, he owned up that no girl would ever fall for him and he felt justified in pawing any female he took a shine to. That’s when I summoned my cousin Mona (who liked to brag her favorite flavor was scrotum) to help us kill the rest of our box. After that, Zubin never groped another voc co-ed.

Enhanced Liebfraumilch, Zubin and Mona are why I can’t report Aida, so once again I submit: No, None, Negative.

Next day, there’s no fume extractor, but there is a Post-it: From Parker Pinkley:

We’re never returning the fume extractor. Why? Because we did real college, real med school, real internships. While you did what? Got a GED? Ha! On the job training? Instant gratification? Don’t even start in on the virtue of waiting. We wrote that book. We have ORs to maintain. Awards to win. Reps to build. Welding is poisonous. Our maverick state-of-the art techniques work, so: No More Shenanigans. We’re a team—you’re our players, we’re your coaches. Now get out there and weld, solder, braze, breathe, tremble, report.

An end to your buffoonery.

How do you really feel, Parker Pinkley?

All morning Aida does not show up. She’s probably sleeping it off. At lunchtime she weaves into the shed like a drunken Ford Galaxie. I show her the Post-it.

“They’re saying no fume extractor so they can give us the treatment?” she says. She spins the prayer wheel and lets its wind blow over all ten directions of her.

I shrug.

“I’m doddering as it is,” she says.

I nod.

“You reported me, didn’t you?”

I shake my head.

“Thank you!” she says. “You’re the sweetheart of my life. From now on, no more slacking off, no more leaves. I mean it. You’ll see.”

Just then the shed door opens a crack.

“We’re saved,” Aida says. “They were joking.”

But we’re not saved, even though a fume extractor gets shoved through the door. A faux extractor. Stuck on it is a Post-it:

Place this extractor where the study nurse is sure to see it. Regarding research, tie skull caps loosely. Weld, breathe, weld, breathe. Should fumes bring on Parkinson-like symptoms, report immediately for treatment.

I toss the extractor in a corner and Aida sits next to it groaning.

Next day Aida limps in as if her feet are bricks; she’s sober as a tombstone. She spins the prayer wheel.

Together we stare at the rows of radiators we’re to lap-joint, horizontal position. Aida shivers and quavers. I’m putting on my ppg when in walks the study nurse, Nurse Hart. She smells like bad news.

Nurse Hart eyeballs Aida and starts Gatling-gunning her observations—da-dunt, da-dunt, da-dunt—before passing me a Post-it. It’s from Parker Pinkley. He says:

Maybe you think you’re being a friend to Aida—coming to her aida (!!!) But her health has the shelf life of a used electrode. Unless she receives our treatment. Do the right thing. Go to the men’s trailer and send us the truth about her.

So I go to the men’s trailer and get in touch with my inner welder: Angel intercourse, what a flop; inoculated Liebfraumilch, big goose egg; Aida’s going so softer in the brain, she’s nearly crabbing on all fours. So I submit: Yes. Many. Affirmative.

When I return to the shed, Aida and Nurse Hart are gone. Most of Aida’s ppg and the bags of fortified box wine are also gone, carried off like a to-go order. All Aida left behind is a Post-it.

Fuckwad! And to think, I almost fell for you. Glad I found out what a shit you are first. And what about Thad having a zombie for a mommy, huh? I’m telling the Reverend Francine what you did. The Angel Communicator will come phoning for you and she can pack some hellatious devine tidings, jerkface. A cow pox upon you. Aida.

I miss her already, Aida Blue, such a majestic name, the sweetest, scariest woman welder I’ve ever known. I whiff her skull cap to breathe her back to me.

Deidre Perish walks into the shed and hands me a Post-it. From Pinkley:

Say hello to Deidre. A well weldress, brimming with health. A potato-eater, true, but does she ever have a pair on her—bra cups big as salad bowls—I should know, I did the pre-study exam. And strong. Her application says she’s mastered the hot shot and the overhead-butt in all positions, the equivalent of a Black Belt in welding. I’m sure you two will bond—get it?—bond! and together make up for lost time, cranking out the required souped up muscle cars per day. Just remember, no liaisons, no alcohol, no angel interface, no dilly-dallying allowed on study time.

Deidre hangs her baseball cap on Aida’s prayer wheel. I ignore this and, in a gesture of welcome, hold out a spare helmet.

She shakes her head and shows me her new auto-darkening helmet with multiple shade settings from eleven on up. “Mine’s more efficient,” she says. “I don’t have to lift up and flip down my helmet as much.” Her voice is a tight falsetto.

I pine for Aida’s wine-dark syllables.

Deidre puts on her ppg and starts tee-jointing the chassis of a Chevy Bel Air, Finish Line.

I put on my ppg and begin flange welding the Bel Air’s fuel tank, the whole time watching her watching me watching her.

We move onto brazing the radiators on a pair of Skylarks, Grim Reaper and Cashing In. It’s hard keeping up though because of all the helmet lifts and flips I have to do.

We work through lunch. By late afternoon, I feel frying panned; I take a break and offer her some of my coffee and sandwich, but she says no thanks.

I miss the way Aida slurped Liebfraumilch on the job.

My arms and legs are stiff, but I’m back at it, single v-grooving a Corvette, Lights Out, until evening. I’m having sudden freezing spells but luckily the shed’s so dim, Deidre can’t tell. I want to return to the men’s trailer and phone Dad, check on his burns, ask about his glass replacements. But if I call it a day, will Deidre call me a shirker?

She squats under a Maverick, Meet Your Maker, for a double-jointed square butt-weld, so I bend myself over a Gremlin, Peter Out, for a triple-jointed vertical lap-groove.

She brazes. I solder. She plugs, slots. I multi-pass, corner joint. I’m a Duster, Custer’s Last Stand. She’s a Challenger, Down for the Count. We’re racing. She’s winning.

“Slow down,” I say and drop to the floor, perspiring a sweat angel. My brain has the runs.

“Go ahead, rest,” she says. “I’ll weld whatever you can’t finish.”

No study nurse comes in.

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Sleep

Carlea Holl-Jensen

If you’re tired, I will dig you a bed in the soft dirt of a field, so that you can lie down and sleep. The fertile earth will be a cool pillow beneath your cheek, and I will sing to you, an old curse-canceling sort of song, she will not die but only sleep awhile, that kind of thing. Once I’m sure you’re comfortable, I will kiss your forehead and then I will pile the earth over you with my bare hands.

Ritual sleep is the best kind, I’m told, for the genuinely weary. When all diagnosis fails, sleep will heal you. During ritual sleep, the whole world hangs held-breath for you to wake. Your promises are not broken while you sleep, your plans wait patiently to be kept. You will sleep for ten, twenty, a hundred years, and, when you’re ready, you will get up again.

I will miss you, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I will not forget you while you sleep. However much the world twists on its string, I will keep the memory of you close to me always. When I am working a steady job, married and paying off a house, I will take my daughter to see your sleeping place, and I will put my hands on her shoulders and say, “This is my friend Michelle, she’s resting.” And maybe the sound of my voice will trickle down through the earth to reach your ears, and maybe you will dream of me.

Your dreams will only be good ones, and the fruit of your sleep will be extraordinary in its richness. The soil will be strengthened by your sleeping, and new trees will grow up, bearing long skeins of white silk and small, semiconductive ornaments that fit neatly on the lapels of women’s jackets. Migrating birds will pause in their course to circle above you because the air will be sweet with your sleep. It will always be the peak of spring around your sleeping place, and small yellow flowers the shape of stars will grow up amongst the grass.

This is the sort of rest you deserve. If I could ask the world to lie down and wait for you, I would. I would still the sea to give you time to find your secret home inside your heart.

So lie down, my dear. The wind is just right for singing lullabies. I’ll watch over you as long as I am able, and in ten, twenty, a hundred years, you’ll get up again. When you’re ready.

Three Poems by Lindsay Vella

The Way to the Sea

Because mercury is always moving, because

sandwiches are best when they’re cut

in half, because if something is beautiful,

it will poison you, I have made my decision.

For seven years, we lived in a house sewn

together with black stitches. A circus tent. The

sound of quarters against knuckles, the heft of

two bowling pins in the left hand, one in the right.

Listen. I woke up one morning with a pocketknife

in my hand. I dreamed there were lions in my house.

Now, the smell of your hair is caught in my nose.

My lullaby to the moon, my how you have grown.

Spit Out the Seeds

In hindsight, we will all say

that we didn’t know what to expect.

Believe me when I say this is where

we’ll all end up eventually:

six miles away from a man

whose hands only ever touch machines.

The first time he touches a pear,

he holds it like a newborn.

The second time, he eats it.

The first time he holds a newborn,

he touches it like a pear.

The second time, he eats it.

Thirst

Crayon-face, it’s so simple.

She was born in October, her hair

white as any bone. Before long,

there was an apocalypse, and she forgot

how it felt to breathe underwater. Masquerader,

her hair turned blacker than any charcoal,

and she began to remember how it felt to exhale.

If you knew what she meant when she said she was

thirsty,

would you have asked in the first place?

*

The formula is this:

pity as the price of admission, a slip,

a stone, and something as common as hunger.

Everything here is made of wood,

soaked to the grain, or stolen. Charlatan,

her story is the same in any weather.

If you should find her ankle-deep

in floodwater, please take her plum-skin hand

and lead her farther in.

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The Other Realms Were Built With Trash

Rahul Kanakia

Aldram’s glass tower jutted out from a sea of grey waste. His platform was suspended only a few dozen feet above the mass of human hair, plastic bags, shredded cardboard and other detritus.

He squinted at a distant mountain of crushed cars, hoping that Benny was about to appear with his load of human corpses. He had been gone for five days; Aldram’s assistant could usually find suitable vessels in a few hours. Perhaps he was just being more discriminating with Lord Reva’s new body.

The air was filled with a constant low thunder as lost objects winked out of the human world, materialized above the Dump, and fell. Man-sized flies filled the sky, darting down to catch fragile objects and bring them to the Recycling Tower, while giant spiders trawled the surface, looking for raw materials.

Cliff faces on either side, perhaps a mile distant, marked the Dump’s border with the Other Realms. A line of wooden pallets was floating out of the Recycling Tower, carrying the recycled goods towards unmoving figures on cliff’s edge. Beyond, Aldram could barely make out the fairy cities, clusters of cloud-piercing towers whose glass shells caught the light like a prism. He had lived within sight of them for all his life without ever coming closer than this.

In his youth, he had stared at them for hours, imagining how his world would appear from such heights. The Recycling Tower would seem like the beating heart of the Other Realms, receiving veins of empty pallets from across the ravine and sending them outwards in gushing arteries of goods. From atop those spires, he would be able to see new towers rise up all around him, planned on paper he had recovered, built with his metals, and assembled by mages who wore his cloth. Looking back at him, those artisans would nod, as to an equal, and perhaps offer just a word of thanks for making their way of life possible.

Aldram’s daydream was interrupted by a shout. A giant spider was scuttling toward him, dragging a web-sac. A man was waving at him from a saddle tucked just behind its head. When it reached the base of the tower, the spider leapt ten feet, and skittered up its walls. Aldram winced as the web sac thudded against the tower, though he knew that the bodies were cushioned by spidersilk.

The spider crawled onto the platform. Aldram could see his own squat, wizened body in its eight eyes. Benny climbed off its back, using fistfuls of hair as handholds. When he was on the ground, he waited a moment, then shrugged the assault rifle off his back and struck his mount with the butt. The spider released the web-sac.

“Did you run into trouble?” Aldram said. Benny shooed the spider off the platform, and began to saw at the web-sac with his fairy-glass knife.

“Just a few reavers in the distance,” Benny said. “But they ran off when I approached.”

“Too bad you couldn’t persuade any to come back.” Benny was the only member of Aldram’s indentured human workforce who hadn’t run off to go scrounging in the Dump.

“There were a lot more corpses than normal,” Benny said. “But they were in terrible condition. I did manage to find a few young ones. They’re in … decent shape.” He reached into the web-sac and Aldram moved to help him.

The first corpse they withdrew was a young woman, still wrapped in a blanket. Her left side was a mess of burns, blackened in some places and red underneath. Her left arm ended in a blackened curl.

“You call this decent shape?” Aldram said. He rubbed the sweat from his face, and came away with his hand coated by glistening hair. The air was always hazy with floating strands. “Perhaps she was cremated poorly.”

“They were all like this. But look at her from the right. She could have been a pin-up,” he said.

Reva would be furious if his vessel was less than perfect. Time passed slowly in the Other Realms. But injuries also took centuries to heal, and the agony of old pains could become unbearable. So the fairies crafted new bodies from human corpses.

Like all recycled goods, these bodies deteriorated. Once a fairy had changed vessels, regular transferences were a necessity, or he would eventually wither and fade away. Poor-quality vessels wore out even more quickly.

Aldram became more frantic with each disfigured body that he retrieved. Even those with a full complement of limbs were pockmarked with blisters and covered in burn scars. Some were naked, but many had clothing that was fused to the skin in places. His mood wasn’t improved by Benny’s commentary.

“This one looks like cousin Milton. He’d walk five miles to pitch in during the harvest.”

“This is unacceptable!” Aldram said. “I asked you for the young and beautiful. It would be worth my life to ask Lord Reva to inhabit a damaged vessel.”

“These were the best,” Benny said. He was blinking back tears. “Would you rather have a load of beautiful torsos? I found plenty of those. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so many banged-up people. Looks like a bomb got most of them.”

“Humans and their wars,” Aldram muttered. He would have to make the best of this situation.

“I need you to get the makeup,” Aldram said.

But Benny was crouched down, staring at the corpses, “What do you think happened down there in the real world?”

“Just another die-off. They go in cycles.” Aldram had seen everything from bubo-covered bodies during the Black Death to oceans of starveling, skeletal remains more than six hundred later. “You only have ten years left in your term of service. When you go back, you can drop a letter in the trash and tell me what’s happened.”

“After a hundred years, will there be anything to go back to?”

“Go get the kit,” Aldram said. He had waited far longer than Benny’s hundred years for a chance to go home. Perhaps, after the ceremony, his wait would end.

Aldram had done his best to prepare for Lord Reva’s arrival. He had washed the bodies and covered their wounds with make-up and concealing clothes. Then he had enchanted the three males and seven females to stand at attention in the center of the transference room, which he had cleaned furiously. But to Aldram’s eyes, the scars were easily visible under the paint.

At the peripheries of the room, wooden pallets heaped high with faerie goods floated up from the bowels of the Tower. The transformed products gleamed, even in the diffuse light that filtered through the dirty windows. Unlike their human counterparts, fairy goods could be enchanted by artisans in distant cities. But for all their beauty, the fairy products were ephemeral things, disappearing after only a few months or years. Without constant replenishment from the human world, the Other Realms would simply fade away.

The most important transformation was that of cold iron and steel into fairy glass, a translucent alloy that held all of its ingredients’ strength and none of their dangers. The pits that held these metals were buried deep within the tower. As a changeling, Aldram was the only fairy that was able to withstand prolonged exposure to such materials.

There was no sound or flash. There were simply more people. The guards appeared with knives drawn and fanned through the room, sniffing for iron. When they were satisfied one of them nodded and spoke a few syllables. The rest of Reva’s court appeared in order of precedence. Aldram fell to his knees as he read the rank insignia on their sashes; they represented some of the oldest houses in the Other Realms.

Lord Reva was the last to appear. He had one hand pressed to a mask that covered his mouth and nose. Reva was wearing a coat of spotless white, covered in delicate golden tracery.

Aldram’s gaze dropped to the floor. He was conscious of his stained human overalls and the hair clinging to his face. He had spent so much time preparing the corpses that he hadn’t been able to change into proper fairy clothing.

Footsteps approached, and he had to strain to hear Reva’s muffled voice. “These ones seem different,” Reva said.

“Oh, but they are very young,” Aldram said. “Good for many more years than the normal lot. I spared no effort in finding you the very best vessels.”

“You handled them yourself?” Reva said, his voice rising in pitch.

“No, no. My assistant, a human, he prepared them for you. I don’t soil myself with …”

“I would expect one of your kind to associate with humans.”

This was going all wrong. “But there have always been indentured humans,” Aldram said. “For as long as I’ve been here. Hundreds and hundreds of years. We need them to do work fairies can’t do.”

“You are a fairy only in name, changeling.”

Aldram had been born in the mortal realm. But he came out wizened and old, withdrawn and given to violent fits. His bewildered parents had tried to drown the fae out of him. Instead the fae came for him. To rescue him, he’d thought.

Reva turned back to the corpses. “The coloring of these vessels is peculiar.”

“I got you only the youngest, the freshest, the best. No one can select a host better than me,” Aldram babbled. In his frantic gesturing, Aldram’s fingertips grazed against Lord Reva’s sash.

He had enough time to hope that no one had noticed before gasps erupted from the court. Reva reared back, his mouth hanging open. He gestured at a guard, who struck Aldram in the stomach.

Aldram collapsed to the floor. He gasped, trying to pull breath from his constricted chest, and scrambled to prostrate himself before the other guards could join in.

The next blow never came. Lord Reva said, “How much human trash has passed through those fingers? If you ever lay hand upon me again, you will not survive the gesture.” One of the courtiers was gingerly removing Reva’s sash. The courtier let it drop and muttered a syllable. It ignited before hitting the floor.

Reva continued, “I would give you to the flames as well. But we need you to handle the filth.”

Reva paced back and forth along the row of corpses. Aldram kept his head pressed to the floor. Reva said, “This one. Destroy the others.”

Aldram heard nine thunderclaps in succession, and then blinked as a scattering of dust blew into his eyes. Reva said, “I cannot go into my next life carrying your touch. I will return after taking purification.” The room was filled with rushing air as the court disappeared from the Recycling Tower.

Aldram levered himself to his feet. He could feel every one of the wounds he had accumulated over years of beatings. Traditionally, changelings weren’t allowed to change vessels. In his youth, his mentors had told him that gaining a new body would eliminate his resistance to iron.

Benny found Aldram slowly sweeping the transference room, wincing with each step. He took up a broom as well, and said, “Why do you put up with it?”

“Reva is the only one who can admit me to the city,” Aldram said. It might be decades, centuries, before another noble of Reva’s standing visited the Dump. His foolishness had lost him his best chance.

“They’ll never let you out of here; they need you to do their dirty work.”

“I know that I can’t stay. But I want to see what all this is for.”

Benny leaned in close. “Just get up and go. Screw all of them.”

“I don’t want to sneak in. I want to be welcome.”

“You’re never going to get a red carpet. But they know they need you. Sit yourself down on the steps of the palace and let them try to throw you out.”

Aldram pushed Benny aside. “This is my place in life. Don’t forget yours.”

“Just keep choking it all down, then,” Benny said. He stalked to one of the open doors, where his spider was waiting. He stopped abruptly. “It’s never snowed before.”

White flakes were frosting the ground of the Dump. Aldram hobbled past Benny out onto the platform. This wasn’t right. It was still searingly hot.

They stood there, watching the horizon. The thunder had gotten more frequent. Cars were falling by the dozens, smashing the mailboxes, furniture, and other trinkets already on the ground. A smear of green dropped past the platform. He looked over the edge at a metal board calling attention to “Exit 23A to Woodside.” There was a tremendous thunder-clap as a submarine appeared near the edge of the ravine with water pouring from a tear in its side. As one end hit the ground, the other one smashed into the side of the cliff and the submarine came to rest at an angle.

The flakes covered Aldram’s face and hair. When he brushed them off, they crumbled into grey specks. The sky was raining ash.

For awhile, Aldram tried to keep the dust from clogging the gears and wheels that kept the pallets running. Then the ashfall accelerated, and all of his work was undone within an hour. They spent the next week huddled under a make-shift tent of fairy cloth as the ash blanketed the ground outside. Occasionally, they would hear a clang or scrape as some human object knocked into the tower.

On one of his periodic trips outside, Aldram saw a grey-shrouded figure wading towards the tower, picking his way through the debris. Was it was a reaver, caught unawares, struggling towards a place that had once been his home? When Aldram checked a few hours later, the man was gone and the ash was a few feet higher.

The flies buzzed overhead, circling the tower at high speeds, unable to fill their trained function. More and more of them fell from the sky, exhausted. The unlucky ones landed on the ground, and disappeared. The pallets sent back from the cliffside stacked up underneath cauldrons that produced nothing.

Eight days passed before they saw the sun again, hanging static on the horizon as it traced an eons-long path across the sky. Twitching spiders and flies were strewn across the tower. Unable to die, they waited for Aldram to revive them.

Aldram heard a loud crack. A mass of blackened wood appeared, splintering when it hit a stone footbridge peeking through the ash. Of course the buildings would come next, as they slowly faded from human history. They fell throughout the day: from shacks with roofs of corrugated tin to glass palaces that shattered when they hit.

“Are you coming with me?” Benny said. He was wearing a pack and harnessing one of the spiders.

“We won’t need more bodies for some time,” Aldram said. Dozens were lying atop the ash, within easy reach.

“I’m joining the reavers. There’s no point going home now,” Benny said. His comment was punctuated by the fall of a bronze statue.

“We can use the spider to drag that out. The alchemists always need more bronze.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’ll all stop in a few days. Then the Dump will get mined out and disappear.”

“It will take years for those huge metal towers you told me about to fall into the ocean and make their way here. Centuries maybe,” Aldram said.

Benny dropped his packs and walked over to Aldram. He grabbed the fairy by the shoulders and said, “They are going to keep treating you like shit. Hell, they’ll probably blame you for all this. But we are gonna need you.”

“I need to get the pallets moving. The Other Realms must be falling apart,” Aldram said. Would they think he had abandoned his duties?

“You can go,” Aldram continued. “All the rest gave me speeches before they left. I thought you had more responsibility. But I went on without them, and I can go on without you.”

“Listen to me! Whether it’s now, or centuries from now, everything will fall apart. Come with me and start something new.”

If the humans were truly gone, how much longer would it be before Aldram picked the Dump clean? He had always known that if he waited long enough, the Other Realms would open up to him somehow. What if he no longer had eternity? Would they fade away while he waited for his chance?

“You’re as much like me as you are like them. And there’s nothing else you can do for them.”

“Alright,” Aldram said. “I’ll join you. But there’s something I need to do first.”

Aldram approached the towers obliquely, letting his spider avoid the homesteads dotting the dusty, boulder-strewn landscape that made up most of the Other Realms. He left the spider to wander beyond the hills, and set off on foot, drawing the hood of his robes over his head. Benny had argued against this detour, conjuring up all kinds of vicious punishments for his trespass. But Aldram needed to see what he was leaving behind.

The city was far more complex than the austere spires Aldram had pined for. All of the towers flowed from the same thick trunk, splitting and branching, with no apparent direction or common style. One tower split off from the main trunk and plunged deep into the earth, emerging several hundred feet farther as a glass hut topped by a triangular roof. Three other strands intertwined, half a mile high, holding up a garden platform that spilled vines and roots.

Tiny figures were suspended in dew-drops of glass that clung to the sides of many of the towers, while others walked through long corridors that hung over the air. Pallets of goods zipped through the air, paying no heed to the fairies floating between the towers or crawling up their sides. As he got closer, he noticed that the towers were pockmarked with small sores, and some of the dew-drops seemed to be melting away.

At the base, the gaps between towers were obscured with green vegetation fed by springs of free-flowing water, a rarity in the lifeless Other Realms. There was a line of carts trundling out of a large gate; they were stacked high with goods and accompanied by shuffling clots of people. The vehicles overhead were more diverse, ranging from men sitting astride flying horses to castles in the air. But, amongst all the traffic, only Aldram seemed to be moving towards the towers.

A man jumped off of an observation platform, flying towards Aldram, arm outstretched. He was wearing a guard’s sash. Aldram froze. He wanted to live. But the triumph of finally seeing this place washed out his fears.

There was a gasp from somewhere behind him. Two figures and various crates, all strapped to stacked panes of fairy-glass, had flown overhead moments before. Now shouts and curses were drifting down as the platform inched backwards.

When the platform touched down next to the guard, he engaged in a short, spirited conversation with the two men standing on it. The straps sprung off the crates and the men were thrown from the platform by an invisible force. Then the guard, and the plates of glass, drifted back towards the tower, leaving the men sprawled amongst their belongings.

As Aldram trudged past, one of them called out, “There’s nothing in there for us.”

He pulled his hood tighter and tried to keep walking, even when he heard footsteps. The man said, “You’d be better off following us to the next city.”

Aldram turned around and muttered, “I had to come.”

The man recoiled when he saw Aldram’s wrinkled face. “You’re in deep trouble, my friend. Can the swap-out wait? Our changeling’s gone and gotten angry. Started a ferocious storm out in the Dump. You can’t even see the Recycling Tower for all the dust, much less get there.”

They just thought he was an old man, coming in for a transference. Aldram said, “This is my only hope.”

“Then you’d be better off trying to make your way to the Tower yourself. The lords here won’t help you. With supplies shut off, they’ve started to steal the youngest glass for themselves. We put together our place only a few weeks ago. Earlier today, someone came by and ripped half of it away. We were trying to escape with the other half, but you saw how that went. They’re not letting anyone in, and they’re not letting anything valuable out.”

“Is he coming with us?” the second man said as he paced towards them.

“No, looks like he spent too long in the Borderlands. Or maybe out in the mortal world. Has to make a swap-out fast.”

The second man looked at him as if he was already dead. “That’s all over now. The changeling went crazy when Reva was trying to get a new body. He threw human blood all over the Lord and broke out of the bonds that were keeping him trapped there. Then he brought the entire human world crashing down on us. People’ve been whispering about his human army for ages. I bet they’re all out there, waiting for us to disappear.”

Aldram felt a tingling build up behind his heart, and he struggled to cut off his laughter. “What does it look like from up there? At the very top?”

“You’ve been in the beyond for too long. We’d get blasted out of the sky if we even started to float up to the palaces,” the first man said.

“Come, we’d better keep moving. Before they come back and decide that they like the looks of our clothes too,” the second man said. He turned back towards the upended crates.

The first man stared at Aldram for a few moments. His hand drifted up to his face, and then he turned away as well.

The two men headed off, their crates skating along beside them, leaving Aldram with a city that was cannibalizing itself.

Aldram imagined the city stripping away the accretions of countless generations, until, within only a few years, it was a solitary tower staring out over a ravine still filled to the brim with toxic iron that could have been used to rebuild—if only someone was able to collect it. And then even that tower would shrink, until all that remained to mark this place was a patch of flattened ground.

“Finally satisfied your curiosity?” Benny said when Aldram entered the cave. He gathered his packs. “When I was out scouting, I saw footprints and spider tracks in the ash. Looks like some reavers were holed up in a cave nearby. We can head towards them as soon as you’re rested.”

“I’m going back to the tower. And I want you to come with me.”

“I ought to have known that you’d lose your nerve,” Benny said. “But you’re a fool if you think I’m going to spend another ten years slaving for you just so I can go back to a burned out, blasted Earth.”

“Then don’t go back. The city needs us. It’s falling apart.”

“If they needed us so bad, then they should have treated us better. Now their time is over, and even if you work hard as you can, you’re only going to put a few more years in front of the crash.”

“Even if that city is fated to disappear, it can’t be because of me.”

“You’ve lived in the Dump longer than anyone alive. We need you. And we won’t shit on you for it.”

Benny was pleading. Did he need Aldram so badly? Or was he afraid to lose his only friend? “Leave me, if that’s what you need to do. But what can the reavers give you?” Aldram said. “After we’re gone, the spiders and flies will die. The human food in the Dump will run out. This world is not habitable without magic, and you have none. Come back with me. We’ll tough out these final days together.”

Benny harnessed his packs to the spider. “You and your kind,” he said. “You eat garbage. Do you know that? You’re just a bunch of rats who scurried around in our trash. Human beings aren’t like that. When you’re all gone, we’ll crawl out of this heap and figure out how to put it all back together.”

The Recycling Tower was already starting to show gaps where the fairy-glass had faded away. Aldram could see the builders camped out at cliff’s edge, unable to repair the tower. Within a year, the Recycling machinery would have faded to uselessness.

Aldram began by reviving the flies lying in the ash. Gradually, the legions of insect gatherers rose into the air and began to root through the ash with their slender forearms. They had to burrow deep, but a trickle of supplies began to run through the cauldrons again.

He spent days crawling through the depths of the Tower, scraping ash from the gears, shuddering as he moved past pits of iron and steel. Before long, his repair trips became mindless journeys, where only the fear of collapsing in those tunnels and being sapped dry kept him moving.

He had only managed to get an intermittent stream of pallets moving when Reva and his entourage appeared. Aldram hadn’t had time to clean the transference area yet. He lumbered towards a corner, and rooted through the dust for the broom.

“I see that you haven’t stopped neglecting your duties,” Reva said. “Why were our supplies interrupted?”

Aldram’s efforts with the broom were just moving the dust around, and when he tried to sweep faster his joints cracked with each movement. There were tendrils of fear in his spine, but he was too exhausted to let them dominate him. Aldram stared at Reva, looking into his eyes for the first time.

“Your only function is to maintain this tower, and you failed.” Reva looked at the body he had selected earlier, which still stood in the center of the room. “My vessel is filthy. Another failure.”

Aldram withdrew a cloth and began to dab at the corpse’s face. He wiped away the make-up along with the caked layers of ash, revealing the scars underneath.

“What is wrong with its face? I will not limp through this life in a cracked vessel.”

“There was a war in the human world,” Aldram said. He had gone through too much to let Reva heap new indignities upon him. He continued to clean the corpse, rubbing away the scabs and baring the raw skin underneath. “This is all there is. Better than you deserve.”

“That is not acceptable,” Reva said. “You will have to find an unscarred vessel.”

Aldram turned to face Reva, looking him in the eyes for the first time. “The humans blasted their world to pieces,” he said. “There are no unscarred vessels.”

“Do not contradict me,” Reva said. He sucked in his breath and exhaled sharply. “What about that human that was skulking around here? He seemed in fine shape.”

“He’s gone,” Aldram said.

“You will direct my men to him.”

Aldram began to inscribe the runes in the body’s scarred and blackened face. He did the work with his fingers, enjoying Reva’s horror at each pass. The skin came off under his nails, coating his fingers. “The body is nearly ready for you, my Lord.”

“Tell me where the human went!”

Aldram waited until he had drawn the last rune on the body’s forehead before he said. “Now all you have to do is take my hand.” His blackened fingertips stretched towards Lord Reva.

The guard closed in, but Reva waved him away. “Fine,” he said. “If this is all that you have been able to find, it will do for the short term. Get on with the procedure.”

“Take my hand,” Aldram said, moving closer.

Reva continued to back away. “That is not required. I have already prepared myself.” He spoke a few words, and glowing runes appeared on his face. “Finish the transference and we will leave you.”

Aldram struggled with the words he needed. But all he could choke out was, “This time you will take my hand.”

Reva’s back touched the wall. A tear fell from his contorted face. He barked a single syllable, and his retinue disappeared. Then he grabbed Aldram’s hand. Fingers snapped in Reva’s grip, though Aldram couldn’t feel anything until Reva began to grind the fractured bones. Aldram cried out from the pain lancing through his body from a dozen points of pressure.

“I won’t tolerate your games. You don’t have any power! You will stay here from now on, and you will obey me,” Reva shrieked. He dragged Aldram back to the corpse.

Aldram screamed the words, pretending the edge in his voice came from elation, and reached out to touch the corpse’s forehead. His broken hand was freed, releasing new agonies, when Reva’s old vessel fell to the ground and began to fade away.

The corpse sloughed its imperfections. Clothing tore as limbs elongated. The skin paled and the burn scars faded to near-invisible creases. Its face tightened, losing the crust of age and care, showing sharply defined cheekbones. Its hair became fine and silvery; the eyes twisted to life, flitting over Aldram.

Reva, now fully inhabiting his body, whispered a few words and disappeared, leaving Aldram alone to nurse his pain and triumph.

Aldram healed, eventually. The fingers became hooks that twisted at strange angles and, unless he exerted himself, his hand fell into a claw. The floor went unswept, and he was content to wear the same clothes until they fell to tatters. He didn’t dress the corpses anymore. Or bother to hide their burns.

They left him alone. Except when they came for their vessels, standing erect and spotless in the dirt of the transference room, and nodded through his warnings of impending collapse as they gritted their teeth for the distasteful ritual to come. But when he reached for them with the broken hand, they took it. At first it was with contempt and revulsion. Then, for the ones who hadn’t known it any other way, with boredom.

The towers grew taller than ever, fueled by a temporary increase in materials as the entire human world was regurgitated into the Dump. And Aldram stalked through those towers at will. From the golden throne room to the meanest garden, fairy-wives and fairy-husbands laid offerings to placate him. But none dared bar their door to him, or refuse his nod.

And every year the Dump sank lower, his tower seemed taller, and the shrouded figures who watched Aldram from the far corners of the Dump grew more numerous.

Alice: a Fantasia

Veronica Schanoes

1) Ina First

For it’s very easy to forget Elsie, eldest of the treacle sisters, as she sits at the bottom of the well and waits to come up, but it was she who met Uncle D. first, after all, and she who first took tea with him back when her sisters were all too young—babies, really—for such a treat, and it should be easy to see how she should have been first in his love, and through him first in all our hearts.

But look at the photographs and think, who could be captivated by such a one as her? A face only a mother could love, and that’s the truth. With her oversized brow and her sulky expression, it is not a lory she reminds one of so much as an egg. No, she could never be the heroine of the tale, but perhaps she could have been Humpty-Dumpty, teetering on the edge of a precipice and hurling glory and scorn down on her sister in contemptuous tones, glory and veiled threats of murder.

For alas for poor Ina! Even if Uncle D. had been taken with Ina first, first Ina with her high brow and set sausage curls, the curls that hung down bedraggled and unloved around her surly face, his heart was soon lost forever and always, to her younger sister, whose name he set among the stars. Alas, alas, for the little lass, alias Miss Alice, had a dark and disturbing gaze, bewitchingly delicate eyebrows, and a darling little pointed chin. The dark glow in her eyes set her apart, the glow of the abyss.

And yet, what was so special about Miss Alice? Nothing, thinks Ina, but what Uncle D. made of her, for isn’t the muse the invention of the artist, the beloved the creation of the lover? Wasn’t Alice a stolid, clever, regular little girl, nothing so remarkable after all? For didn’t she grow into an icy, unpleasant, unremarkable woman? Or perhaps she had been an ebullient, otherworldly delight of a girl and that spirit had been beaten out of her by the rigid switch of the nineteenth century. But who could accuse the Golden Age of flower fairies and children’s fantasy of destroying such a sprite as Uncle D. had imagined existed in his favorite? No, no. After all, aged Ina thinks, Alice must have always been the straight and narrow, the iron child, the respectable dullness that she later became, all the rest must have come from the heart of the lover, the eye of the beholder.

But could it truly only ever have been Uncle D.’s vision and not the creature he beheld, wonders Ina. For if it was thus, why should he not have fastened on me (a knotty problem)? Was it always, is it always, will it always be a matter of prettiness? That little Miss Alice was a dainty elfin creature next to which Ina looked large, pale, slow-moving, and ill-tempered? Could Uncle D.’s vision not pass through that exterior to light upon the spirit beneath?

Or perhaps, and here was a frightening thought, perhaps she had no spirit after all. Perhaps she was as dull and respectable and tame as her sister. Or perhaps she did have a spirit and it was a nasty, vicious thing, not at all congenial to flights of fancy or journeys of adventure. Perhaps the exterior did reflect the interior, in which case Alice must have been a sparkling, ethereal, unsettling spirit after all, because not even Ina could deny that her sister was beautiful, so beautiful as to merit a white stone.

At least, she had been when she was a child. An exceptional child, then, but a stunningly unremarkable adult. Something had been lost in the transition from girl to woman, but then, something always is.

And now, see what has happened! Even I, with the best of intentions, have wandered from Ina to Alice, and instead of elaborating on the plight of the elder sister, I find myself speculating on the spirit of the younger. How easy it is to pass over sulky Ina for ethereal Alice. Is it any wonder that Uncle D. did the same?

So perhaps the prudent thing is to refrain from further discussion and to return to the chapter title. Ina was first, first into the world, first into Uncle D.’s arms, and first to be photographed. She cannot be blamed for being the girl she was and not her sister. So for just a moment, consider Ina first, Ina first, Ina first.

2) Alice Has Mirror-Sign Delusion

Alice has a secret, but not the one you think.

All her life, Alice has looked in the mirror and seen somebody else instead of herself. She is the only one to be so replaced—the images of her sisters, her mother, her father, all appear in the looking-glass where they ought to be, as clear as day. Alice recognizes them, knows them as she would know her own face, if ever it appeared in the glass, which it does not.

Instead of seeing her own brown bob, unsettling eyes, and pointed chin when she gazes into the pier-glass, Alice is confronted with another little girl, quite different from herself. The other little girl she sees has long, stringy blonde hair and no bangs at all. Her hair, all one length, straggles down her back like straw. Her face is round and dull, without any of the questioning gaze that Alice is told can be found in her own eyes. The other little girl never smiles. No matter what delight Alice takes in Uncle D.’s riddles and stories or how often she wins at croquet, Alice’s other-girl-reflection never seems at all pleased or excited, let alone transported with joy. The other-girl-reflection adopts expressions ranging from mildly irritated to viciously angry, no matter how Alice herself is feeling.

And Alice is feeling afraid. She is starting to suspect that this other little girl is plotting to take over her life. After all, the other-girl-reflection follows her around, absorbing every aspect of her existence, and nobody else seems to be able to tell the difference between them. Her mother and governess and nurse fix her hair and dress her in her finest clothing and then tell her to admire herself in the looking-glass. When she looks into the mirror, only she can see the other girl, plotting away and thinking nasty thoughts. All others around her insist that it really is her in the glass and eventually Alice stops arguing. But she is worried that one day the other little girl will step out of the mirror and, quick and brutal as a nightmare, push her through to the other side of the glass where she will be trapped, helpless to intervene as the other little girl plays with her sisters, kisses her mother, and goes to tea with Uncle D. Every morning when she wakes up, Alice opens a book to make sure that she hasn’t been taken to looking-glass land while she slept.

One afternoon, while she and her sisters are on an afternoon boating expedition with Uncle D. and his friend the Duck, she sneaks a peek over the edge of the boat to check her reflection in the water. Sure enough, the ill-tempered stolid blonde girl is looking back at her, daring her to disrupt the summer idyll by making a fuss about something that only she can see. In anger, Alice is about to bring her fist down on the reflection’s face when she glances up and catches Uncle D.’s eye. He looks away quickly, down at the reflection, and then his eyes flick back up to her face, startled. She realizes that he can see the other girl too. He knows. Alice sighs with the relief of the perfectly understood, the perfect harmony, and lets her hand fall gently into the water.

For this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people, thought Uncle D., as he was telling a story to Alice and her sisters. He considered the two girls sharing the name of Alice, the quick-witted, pretty-faced child with a dark bob and profound eyes on the one hand, and her reflection, the sulky plump blonde girl with long hair, reaching through to grab the first girl’s soul, on the other. He has read fairy tales of wicked magicians who stole shadows and mirror-reflections as a way of stealing souls, but never in all these tales has he read of a foreign reflection being sent to take the place of a stolen one.

He shades his eyes against the afternoon sun and watches the three girls making daisy chains.

Or should he say, the four girls?

The rest of the afternoon passes in a dream for Alice. Uncle D. saw the other girl. She knows that he will not betray her, for they have secrets together, she and he, mainly that she is going to marry him when she grows up. Together, she is sure, they can thwart the wicked plans of the looking-glass girl.

Later that week, Uncle D. invites Alice for a photography session. This is not at all uncommon and it is one of the reasons Alice loves him so; Uncle D.’s photographs are the only way she has of knowing what she actually looks like. She poses as a beggar girl, in her best dress, and in Chinese costume. And then it happens. Something wonderful.

“Alice,” says Uncle D. “Would you like to help me in the darkroom? I shall show you guild secrets.”

Would she? To assist in the dark alchemy of mixtures that sometimes stain Uncle D.’s hands quite black! To be allowed into the sanctum sanctorum, the room of no light, there to assist in the mysteries of artistic creation! To move from mere muse to able assistant!

Of course she would.

So, carrying the photographic glass plates in both hands, Alice is ushered into the darkest of rooms. She brings over bottles of foul-smelling chemicals at Uncle D.’s direction and watches as he bathes the glass plates in shallow tubs. After she watches him treat two plates, he sets up another tub of mysterious substances and asks Alice to take charge of the third by herself.

Thrilled and solemn, Alice carefully, gently rocks the glass plate back and forth, back and forth. And for the first time, she sees, oh wonder of wonders, she watches as first a trace and finally a speaking likeness of her own face appears on the glass.

For her part, the looking-glass girl lurks in the mirror, in the water, and waits. Her time will come, she knows. She needs only to bide her time. Long after dark-haired Alice and her sisters have faded into old age, long after Uncle D. is dead and buried, she will still be reigning in triumph and majesty. She can afford to wait.

3) Alice at the Clang Association

The Red Queen, the dread clean lead mien calls the Clang Association to order, to water, oh my daughter. Oh daughter Alice, alas, a lass, the dafter daughter with laughter ought to jump down, drown in her wonderland, under hand, the sundered band, a hundred grand wild creatures, mild teachers, oh child’s features, peering staring quizzically physically from a glass plate, a raucous fate stilled in pages, filled in stages as malice goes underground with wonder found.

O Malice! O Mouse! Let me douse the fire of your pyre, the mire of your gyre, you ferocious liar! And the moral, oh adorable malice, is to take care of sense and the sounds will take care of themselves, but what selves! What delves into the dense sense of tragic magic and emerges in surges of blue? Only a few of the merry cherry toothsome dairy, running true and fast at last, in all kinds of mauled minds with lightning tightening like ice, callous Alice, cruel and caustic, a ghoul, a girl, a true dew pearl afloat in milk and honey.

Thundering hands, wondering lands, wandering sands, brushed with silk and money, hushed and lush with giant mushrooms and sticky sickly treacly blood red falls and squalls. The tea party departing in a ruffled huff paused with its claws dragging and snagging, dripping and clipping, clapping and snapping, catching and snatching at the hair that needs cutting, ruddy in the fading light, the light kite that shudders through the heir.

Oh, airy fairy free! To be own invention, the known convention of flight, lily-white child, wild in her eyes, shifting size and losing temper. For the egg and the sheep and crystalline sleep join hands at the feast. O beast of burden at the final curtain, weep for the shining sea.

Down that hole in the all she calls for the gold, but who holds the pen? The tears on the beach, calling to each duck, dodo, eaglet and wren? The race and the bill taking in their fill, oh fill with the day’s kill the eager mouth—see how it stands to bite the hands hid amid the lilies’ press gangs. Lilies and rushes in armfuls and bunches melt into air at the touch—for the glory, the crush, the uncertain hush, the story’s own lurking rush.

The serpent that wriggles at the tops of the trees, giggling, snickering while the eggs take their ease, the pig in the rig figures on the trigger as she gets bigger than any set of keys. The looming head, the booming dead, cries off with the moth in the boat. While the beautiful soup and contraband tarts soften damned hearts on the grounds, the winter abounds with uncertain hounds tracking the stops of the story’s great pet, the reflected, perfected, inflected girl. Girl! Churl! With nary a curl of the lips as she slips through the grey mist into the gardener’s train—for a queen again! Oh heartless, vain, and needless meme. The fawn is soon gone with fear drawing near and alarm at the child’s bright charm. And the boys in the fright of the night’s black-winged kite, the sheep in the shop and the wool by the wall before the big fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.

The trying lion in the might fight ate plum cake from the red right hand of the monster. It’s my own invention, he said, that two-tone convention, the dry bone and the golden crown. All around town, another queen, the mother dream, at the midnight feast with the right lease and an explosion of hankering hunger.

So she grabs the unfed dread red and shakes and shakes and shakes her—

and it was a kitten, it was all written, only a kitten after all that fall, only a kitten after all.

And life, all life, rife with strife and a-gleam with dreams, moves phantomwise in deep disguise, in saddened but still brilliant eyes.

Dueling Trilogies

Darrell Schweitzer

1

So Bilbo gives Frodo this ring.

There’s a quest to destroy the damned thing.

At the lip of Mount Doom

there’s a question of whom

they should rescue, shove in, or fling.

2

The ancestral pile Gormenghast

is moldy and musty and vast.

Said the heir, Titus Groan,

as he came to his own,

“Screw it, I’m out of here fast!”

Absence of Water

Sean Melican

July 1850

He watched his brother drown. Saw his arms thrashing in the water, feared that someone would come when they heard the pathetic pleas for help. A cramp probably, though he sometimes thought of it as some beast beneath the lake holding his brother’s foot. He could have gone for help, maybe, or thrown something (a vine or branch) but he didn’t. He watched; and as he watched, he thought of the bruises on his stomach and the ones on his back he could see in the mirror. He thought too of the bruises he couldn’t see with any mirror.

January 1864

Caleb Simkins and the eight other men sat around the fire, holding dented metal plates with hardtack, greens and fresh-baked bread donated by the widows of Charleston. Through the windows of the deserted house, the city itself: rubble, fires, and men with buckets. The rain helped.

The wind bent the trees nearly double; the icy rain fell in intermittent heavy sheets. At a certain window that none ever looked through the white froth of the waves smashed against the sides of the blockading ships.

Dixon looked at each of his men. His voice was heavy with fatigue yet strong, and from his strength they gained theirs. “I have been hard on you. I’m proud to serve with each of you, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for any of your lot.”

Becker chuckled, said, “How ’bout a round of cards, Lieutenant? We could use a little fresh money. All we do is change the pot from one hand to another.”

Dixon smiled, shook his head. He was terrible at cards. “What would you spend it on?” None of them smoked, drank, or whored.

Around a piece of salted meat, Becker said, “Food.”

Dixon said, “I’ve requisitioned some more; we should have it be tomorrow. If you’ll excuse me.” He stood, left through the door into the rain-swept night. They could see his hand twisting inside a pocket, in all probability flipping the bent gold coin there.

Ridgeway said, “What do you suppose is with him?”

Dillingham, the supposed spy, said, “It’s obvious: he wants to sink a ship and all we’ve done is drive the boat out and back. How many times have we missed the tide? How many times have we beached ourselves?”

“Ain’t our fault,” Wicks said.

“No, it isn’t. Nor is it his fault. But he takes it as a personal failure. If we could sink just one boat then Beauregard would have to listen, and we would soon have the harbors full of submarines.”

The men said nothing, which is what men say when there is nothing to be said.

The men soon tired of the worn cards and the worn currency and retired beneath thick, scratchy wool blankets. Morning was only a few hours away. They had only just returned an hour ago.

November 1863

Only a few months ago (which seemed like years) Lieutenant Dixon boarded the C.S.S. Indian Chief following by Alexander.

The crew was assembled, the unshaven, barefoot sailors standing proud before a man they respected and feared.

Dixon said, “You’ve seen the Hunley dive beneath this ship how many times? More than any of you can count, I think. She drowned her last crew. She needs a new crew. Thirteen men,” he said, pacing, “have given their lives for the Confederacy. She even took her namesake and creator to the grave. Thirteen! A number that doesn’t sit right with any of us.”

The sailors glanced at one another uneasily.

“But men die. Sometimes futilely. Men have died there,” he said pointing to Fort Sumter. “And there!” That was Fort Moultrie. “And this very deck!” He stomped his boots, mud flakes scattered across the freshly swabbed boards. “But has anyone ever considered not manning Sumter or Moultrie or any ship for fear that they too would die? Of course not! We count the men who have died behind the stone walls or on the wooden decks as heroes and we count their replacements as heroes as well.

“No one hates the Yankees more than myself. No one hates the chokehold they have on our fine harbors. Those damned ironsides keep our munitions from us. We must break this blockade. You know that as well as I. You know this blockade will destroy the Confederacy. Do you wish that? I said, DO YOU WISH THAT?”

“NO!”

“They say this is the cradle of secession! Here, where the first shot was fired. They will say this is where the war was won! You’ve seen the dummy torpedo against your side; now imagine it against those ships! The explosion. The smoke. The ship sinking. The Yankees leap from the rigging. See them die. And see Charleston free and whole and without oppression! Your families are there, your children. See the ironsides sink like the stones they are and see yourself as the hero that does it! I need strong men, brave men, men who love the South and all that she means and together we will crush the North!” He slammed his fist into a palm, raised it, and then let out a wild rebel yell that could be heard echoing from the very ironsides of which he just spoke.

The sailors stepped forward as one thing, the sound of their feet a war drum against the deck. They too lifted their fist to the sky and whooped.

Five men were chosen: Wicks, Becker, Ridgeway, Collins, Simkins.

July 1850

He was only six when his brother died. (When he killed him.) His father put his arm around him saying, “Good boy. Men don’t cry.” No one knew he didn’t cry because he had no reason to.

Looking around at the women in black and the men wearing their white, starched shirts, he wondered how many cried not because they had reason to but because it was expected. It filled him with an anger so that his fists clenched; and when they did, one woman far from him pointed, saying, “How angry he must be. I don’t blame him in the least.” He almost laughed.

He realized, in a child’s way, that they mourned not for his brother’s qualities (good or bad) or deeds (good or bad) he had done. They mourned because a child had died, a generic child, who stood for their children. There but for the Grace of God … God was supposed to judge, on Judgment Day, an individual based on his actions alone. But man was also in the image of God; and so if man judged men based on some ideal version of man (at least when they were dead, ignoring that live men were judged daily and nearly always found wanting, especially by the gossips) then would not God judge based on the same reasoning? There would be no difference between his brother and any of the saints. If there was no sorting of men, then there could be neither Heaven nor Hell. There was no afterlife. But there must be power that gave the world order, and they must be the things that drove the winds and the waves and forced the corn to grow. There was still a morality, but it was a cold and harsh morality. Mercy was not something these gods knew or cared to know.

(Did he think these thoughts at that age? No; he knew that he couldn’t have articulated so well then, and probably not that well even now.)

November 1863

The Hunley sat on blocks on the dock. This was their first glimpse. Negroes swarmed around her like black flies. They carried buckets of lime and rough cloth and rope and material for the stuffing boxes.

She had just drowned a crew of eight with Horace Hunley commanding her. After weeks in the water she smelled of death, which was why there was so much lime.

“There she is,” Dixon said. “Thirty-four feet of three quarter inch iron.”

A man carrying a compass had to twist to get down the forward hatch.

Dixon took them below. He showed each how the compass worked, how to operate the ballast tanks with the bellows to clear the tanks; he showed them how the diving planes took her up or down and how he could tell by looking at the tube of mercury just how deep she went. “A half inch of quicksilver for every foot,” he said. “And if something fails that half-inch represents an eternity. There’s no escape. When she rolled, there were a lucky few, but that was because the hatches were already open. Imagine if they had been closed.” He put a hand on Simkins’ shoulder, the man with him now. “Look up, look down, look forward and aft. This may very well be your coffin.” He let the silence settle like snow.

“Here is where you will sit.” He showed him a small wooden seat. “Here’s the handle. It’s cold now now but after a night of hard cranking it’ll be warm and your hands’ll be bloody. That’s how we drive her, eight men to turn the crank and myself to steer her.”

“She stinks of death; can you smell it? If you’re afraid, say so. There’ll be no shame in saying so; no one will think any less of you.”

None had been chosen because they were cowards.

August 1850

It was difficult to escape the watchful eyes of his parents, for they were stuck to him like flies to shit whenever he went more than a shadow’s length beyond the house. But a six-year-old is resourceful and he soon made his way to the pond.

He had never learned to swim. His brother was supposed to have shown him, but all he ever did was swing out on the old rope, fall in and laugh. He would gesture to his little brother and when the boy pissed his pants he would only laugh harder.

Today he rolled up his legs and waded in. The water was cold, but quickly enough warmed around his ankles. He took another step noticing that the edge sloped gently. Another step, a fourth and suddenly he found himself in water much deeper than he was tall. He splashed and spluttered.

But something buoyed him, gave him the time to learn a few crude strokes and he made his way back to the shelf. He stood and looked out over the water where the wind caused gentle ripples. He patted the water as one would a dog; and he laughed when the current changed and lapped at his feet.

January 1864

Each morning, they knelt in a plain church with Reverend Johnson. Dixon had acceded, deciding that though he carried the bent gold coin it was ultimately God’s power that would save or kill them; and Reverend Johnson was as good as any other reverend.

Simkins knew that it was pointless to pray to something that did not exist. But still, he prayed with them knowing that most of the men believed and he found it a comfort to think that perhaps someone, if not the God they prayed to then at least a god who heard, might be watching over them. He could sense something in the church. They all could.

For the other men, whatever it was they felt sent shivers down the spine, but not the shivers that speaks to a man of comfort but the kind that tells him there is a vicious man or beast just behind him, just behind that tree or building or hidden in the deep shade there.

Entering the submarine was difficult at best: the holes were small so that Simkins had to shrug his shoulders towards. There was always a moment where he felt as if he might become stuck, and then he sucked in his chest and dropped to the floor with the heavy, hollow sound of boots on iron. He was one of the last in, seated next to Alexander.

He would look through the porthole at their target, which today was the Indian Chief for practice, look at the compass and then order the men to begin cranking.

The shaft was always cold, and sometimes Simkins wondered if his hand could freeze to the metal. There was a creaking sound from the shaft in its stuffing box, some popping and other odd noises. The boat would move slowly at first, gathering speed. The crankshaft stuck sometimes; and sometimes his arms felt unyielding. But after a time both the shaft and his arms always warmed to the task.

The sound of the hatches closing vibrated in his chest. All light was gone except for the single candle at Dixon’s side. He would order the ballast tanks opened to the sea and simultaneously adjust the diving planes. Once below the surface, his focus was on the compass. They had a new one, purchased from the divers who lifted her from her last temporary gravesite, but the same problems continued. The compass was too slow and the iron hull interfered so that when they cruised toward the Indian Chief they would often miss. But there were many times when the torpedo stuck true, and the sailors watching from the deck would cheer loud enough to be heard underwater.

Real patrols were much more difficult and much colder. Ice would often form on the inside of the boat while they cruised a few feet below the surface. Negroes were requisitioned to defrost the walls each morning but the ice only seemed more determined after that. Leaning against the hull on occasion, when the boat was not in motion, Simkins could feel the cold water lapping at the outside, eager to gain entrance. He knew, though, that its intention was never to drown them but to join him.

Anderson had spoken to Dixon on behalf of the men, saying the nightly efforts were too much. Perhaps it would be better if they could be towed out from the dock?

Dixon asked and received permission to be towed by the David.

Dixon was envious of the David, one of two torpedo boats patrolling, for she had actually landed a blow. She rode low in the water and was driven by steam. Her torpedo was mounted on a spar on the front. Not long ago she had touched it to the Ironsides. Not enough to sink her, but a success. The resulting explosion sent up a geyser of water, damping the engine. Her captain was captured but she drifted away with two of her crew aboard.

Her new captain was proud of her and said so.

Dixon said, “We have no engine to damp and can’t be seen beneath the water.”

“Perhaps, but they have rigged chain boom around the ironsides.”

This was a concern, for although the booms were intended to stop the David and her sister, they would be equally effective against the Hunley. Still, Dixon insisted that they patrol when the weather permitted.

Unfortunately, the ironsides also carried calcium lights: bright lights that swept the water in search of a darkness that might have been more than driftwood. When they swept toward the David and Hunley the boats were forced to drift. And so was the torpedo behind the submarine.

One night the torpedo line became tangled in the rudder of the David. Her captain saw the torpedo drift straight towards him, ninety pounds of explosive set to detonate with only a touch. The calcium lights swept over, forcing him to hold still while he was suddenly caught in the beam. He counted his heartbeats until the beam swept away: about a hundred beats and less than a minute the beam had rested on them. He flinched.

He waited another moment, then tapped the other boat. He pointed to the torpedo drifting no more than a yard away from her.

Dixon went below and said, “Someone has to untangle her lines.” He said it with calmness and they knew that he would, if necessary, do so himself; but he was an officer and should not have to.

Simkins volunteered.

Once on the gently pitching outer hull, he watched the calcium lights sweep over portions of the water far out. He removed most of his clothes, bobbed for a moment, caught a breath, and dove.

The lines were badly tangled. He pulled on a couple of the coils, stopping when he realized the torpedo was drifting towards the submarine. He took great gulps of frigid air when he rose. When he ran a hand through his hair, rime flaked off.

Dixon watched in horror as the torpedo drifted towards him. Then, amazed, he watched as the wind shifted and the waves moved her slowly but clearly away from the iron hull.

Simkins dove many times. The torpedo continued to drift but each time, the waves pulled or pushed it away. He saw Dixon finger the bent gold coin in his pocket.

Done, he clambered onto the hull and lay on his back. He breathed deeply. The cold uncaring stars wheeled overhead.

Inside, the men offering their coats. Becker huddled near him on one side, Collins on the other. Though they were cold too they offered their warmth to him. He had saved them.

Dillingham said, “Thank God for that coin, Dixon.”

Dixon turned sharply. “Thank God for Simkins.”

His lips were blue and his teeth chattered so none of them heard his words. Good luck pieces were one thing; brave men another; but it was the water itself and not God or any god who had saved them. Of this he was certain.

The captain of the David refused to tow them again.

March 1855

His mother gave birth to another boy. She called him John and a blessing. When he was two years old, he became Caleb’s shadow. And Caleb, his mother thought, enjoyed having a younger brother. He showed him how to dress and tie his shoes and how to play games. He once hauled him to safety when an errant horse thundered down the street, the hooves only missing his left leg by the barest fraction of an inch. That was what the bystanders said.

And then Caleb had left him for a moment, he said, to get something from his room. In that moment John the blessing discovered the water trough for the horses and drowned.

His mother never recovered from the shock. She stared at the empty room and rocked empty clothes to sleep. Finally his father sent her to live with a spinster aunt. She died within the year.

His father wept openly.

His father took to drinking, letting the house fall to ruin. Caleb left when he was fourteen, finding work in an iron foundry; that was where he had built up the muscle he used to crank the boat. That was the story he gave to the others.

January 1864

With the worsening weather came foul winds that made it nearly impossible to take the submarine out. As well, Dixon had decided that the ironsides, with their chain booms, were an impossible target. Instead they would seek to destroy the wooden hulls further out.

That would require two things: some nine miles of cranking for the men (for which he asked and received much closer accommodations; the seven miles of walking to and from the dock was exhausting) and a refitting of the torpedo. He had decided that the David had the better idea. They would put the torpedo on a spar and ram the torpedo into a ship. Barbs like fishhooks would hold it to the hull. When the submarine backed off far enough, he would pull a lanyard to detonate the powder.

Through the cold winter, with thin gloves and thinner patience, he and the others put the spar onto the front and built a system such that it could be raised or lowered beneath the submarine’s hull. Snow fell occasionally though never enough to stick to the ground. The high winds whipped and tossed the white-topped waves.

The nine miles was a lot further than they had ever gone before and the weather made them impotent. Instead of letting his crew fester, perhaps grow bored or lose their conviction, Dixon decided a test was needed.

They would sink the boat a few feet from the dock. Once resting on the ground so that she couldn’t move, they would proceed to crank as if she were. When the air grew foul enough for any man, he would cry, “Up!” and they would rise again. With nine miles of open water, Dixon needed to know their limits.

They laughed and smoked with the soldiers on the dock who stood with their arms wrapped around their sides. They glanced at the sun wondering (as they always did) whether they would ever see it again.

The ship sank through the murky depths. Not far, but far enough. When they felt the hull touch bottom with a slow thump. Each man save for Dixon began to crank. Without a need for a steersman, Dixon was unnecessary. Simkins thought he might offer to relieve one of the men but he did not.

Only the candle offered any light and that cast a strange light Reverend Johnson’s Hellfire. Indeed, it was easy to think they might be in Hell, with only nine men in the sturdiest coffin ever built and strange sounds from the metal itself. They smell of lime and its meaning were overwhelming.

No man spoke; and every man thought: how do I know if I am dead?

The candle flickered, went out. They touched one another for assurance, to remind themselves that living, breathing men still sat beside them. Does a man breathe in Hell? Are there others with him or is he alone? Can there be any more everlasting torment than turning a piece of pipe forever with no hope of going anywhere? Reverend Johnson would know but Reverend Johnson was safe in his church elsewhere.

Dixon said, “Anyone ready yet?”

“No,” they said aloud in stuttered sequence.

They began to count the turns but when one counts ten fingers worth of sets of ten turns, what does a man do? He starts over. It isn’t the number that matters but the fact that time hasn’t ceased.

“Ready?” said Dixon. His voice was husky, his breathing ragged.

“NO!” They shouted it because they could.

The boat shifted. Was it the gentle rocking, like a cradle, that was a soporific?

Effectively blind, they noticed the motion more than they should have, and the sounds of high-pitched pings and low-pitched creaks and groans were omnipresent.

They couldn’t see Dixon twist the twisted gold coin in his pocket but they could hear the low whisper of skin on heavy cotton.

They could hear the breathing of the man to either side and it was becoming increasingly ragged.

It was more difficult to focus, to remember what they were doing and why. They closed their eyes, though it made no difference, and dreamed of sleep.

They could only remember to turn. And turn again and again and again and again.

Breathing became near impossible. Each man gasped like a beached fish taking in huge gulps of worthless air.

Black spots swam before their eyes in a see of bright colors. The world seemed to tilt crazily so that one man or another twisted or shifted suddenly in his seat though he was perfectly balanced.

It became louder, the sound of breathing and gasping, and soon they could hear (but would not think of it until later) that they were breathing in rhythm the way they turned in rhythm.

And then as if they were a single man they cried, “UP! For the love of God, up!”

Dixon and Alexander began to pump the bellows, pushing out the water from the tanks. Dixon’s was fine and the nose began to rise but the stern remained stubbornly on the bottom. There was a great crying and banging against the metal and cries that they were going to die oh god I’m going to die Jesus save me just save me Lord and I will do all that you have ever asked and please God let me see my wife my daughter my son my mother my father once more just once more I can’t die this way oh God this is a cursed thing this boat and I am going to Hell for ever having been a part of her …

The stern began to rise. Alexander said later that a bit of seaweed was stuck in the valve of the pump. “If I had not cleared it so many times,” he told them later, “We would surely have died.”

The boat rose to the surface like a breaching whale. When fresh air flooded the compartment Collins said it was better than the sweetest woman he had ever kissed.

When Simkins stuck his head through the hatch, he was certain he was dead for the world was still black speckled with dots. It took him a very long time to realize that it was only night and the stars were out.

They hadn’t seen stars in so long with the clouds perpetually overhead; it was a sight nearly as sweet as the taste of fresh air.

A single soldier still stood on the dock, shivering violently with his gun cradled in his arms. He’d been certain they were dead.

December 1855

Caleb no longer believed though his dad still forced him into those itchy black clothes and made him kneel on the hard wooden boards and sit on the hard wooden pews. After that his father would drink more that day than ever. Caleb would have to escape to the water or risk being beaten black as a Negro.

February, 1864

The cold weather continued, the heavy wind sending enormous white-topped waves against the beach; the heavy ironsides rocked slowly. Further out, the wooden hulls rocked more violently still. Now and then shells from the blockade were launched into the city. Fires were uncommon, but not fancy dress balls to raise money for the widows and children. At night, the sound of music and laughter stopped momentarily when a cannonball or hotshot arced over the water. When whatever damage was done, the laughter and music continued. Simkins thought that if Hell did indeed exist, perhaps this was it: a world in which people ignored the horrors of war for the finer things, where the lunacy of meaningless death was fought with fancy clothes, joyous music, bad jokes and flirting, spiteful gossip.

They were standing on the dock in the violent wind that day, leaning against barrels, drinking coffee and smoking. The wind was too much for the boat to be in the open water and the iron too confusing for the compass so Dixon made them practice in the calmer waterways behind Sullivan’s Island until their hands were raw.

“My mother said idle hands are the devil’s tools,” he said. “So when your hands are idle, I want them too sore to do more than hold a tin cup.”

Alexander had been called back to work on a new breach-loading gun and Dillingham the spy had been sent to some other location. Simkins thought it was high time that a supposed spy be sent spying rather than doing what any well-muscled man could do. He still thought the man was a fraud but at least he had developed a mild respect for him. The two new men were uncertain but brave, having to bear the double burden of learning the ropes (only figuratively) while replacing two men in a crew that held themselves closer than brothers.

It was while they took a breather (literally, with the submarine staying under so much) that they watched a new ship, the Housatonic, move into the bay. She was only two miles, maybe three, from where they were. She was a big ship but bore a wooden hull.

Dixon took out a pocket spyglass and counted: “One eleven inch Dahlgreen smoothbore; one one-hundred pound and three thirty pound Parrotts; two thirty-two pounders, three howitzers of varying size and one twelve pound rifle. She’s a big one,” he said. “And look where she is.”

Collins said, “It’s like a ten point buck walked under our blind.”

Simkins laughed. “Can’t you count? She’s an eleven point.”

Collins punched him lightly and said, “I ain’t got that many fingers. I heard that Ridgeway used to, ’fore the doctor lopped it off.”

Everyone, Dixon included, laughed. “Looks like our mission has changed.”

They nodded.

“When?” Becker said.

“As soon as the wind dies.”

Ridgeway let out a wild rebel yell. “And then they do.”

It wasn’t until mid-February that the wind dropped off. Dixon decided that though the moon was out, they couldn’t take the chance that the wind would return. Beauregard and the other generals were becoming increasingly impatient; Dixon knew only a single blow to the enemy would turn the generals and they would order more of these boats. They could end the blockaded in Charleston and then Mobile and New Orleans and elsewhere. But first they had to sink a ship.

Reverend Johnson said a special prayer that night ending in, “And may God grant you some Yankee dead.”

“Amen.”

The moon cast a wan light on the gentle breakers. The smell of gunpowder was strong, wafting from the hot guns of the ironsides. Tonight, they would kill.

Dixon carried a calcium light covered with blue paper. They left the hatches open while they slowly entered the bay. Dixon checked the compass and heading, ordered the hatches closed, the tanks filled. He pushed forward on the diving planes so that they dove beneath where the strange sounds of the water penetrated the hull and the candle was the only light.

Ice rimed the walls. The sound of the crankshaft in its braces was steady, monotonous, and comforting. Easy breathing turned labored. Twice Dixon rose to the surface, checked the compass and adjusted the tiller.

“What’s the light for?” Collins said.

Dixon said, “Signal. When we sink her, all of the other gun boats are gonna come down on us like the wrath of God. We’ll signal to the shore, who will signal to us and we will crank as hard as we can for that light.”

Becker muttered something like, “God help us.”

Wicks said, “No one else can.”

Two hours had passed by Dixon’s watch. The candle flickered. He ordered the tanks emptied and pulled back on the planes. The hatch broke the surface. When he looked through the glass, the Housatonic was no more than a hundred yards away.

“Dive!” he cried. “And forward with all your might!”

They couldn’t hear the commotion aboard the big boat, but they could hear the occasional ping of bullets against the hull. They shouldn’t be able to do much damage, but what if they got those guns turned on them? The sweat ran cold on each man as he thought of a hundred pound shot tearing the submarine in half. There were muttered scattered prayers. Except, no one noted, from Simkins.

They cranked hard. Dixon lowered the torpedo to its lowest point. They were going to sink her and not one damn thing could be done.

Except maybe a cannonball through her side.

At that thought, the men cranked harder driving the tiny boat to speeds she had never before achieved.

There was a moment when Simkins thought they might be too deep, simply passing beneath the hull and then he heard the solid thunk when the torpedo struck home. And stuck.

“Reverse!” cried Dixon. “Hard!”

They did. He counted to some number, a number the men couldn’t hear over their own labored gasps, and Dixon pulled the lanyard.

They were too close: the concussion from the explosion rocked the tiny boat, pitching her wildly. The candle went out; the darkness was absolute. Dixon couldn’t see the compass. The boat was likely off course from the blow. Pops and pings, some from the rivets and some from wild shots from the deck, sounded through the hull.

“Up!” he said.

The boat rose to the surface shakily. He looked through the porthole. “She’s listing to port and she is afire!” He yelled again.

Each man knew that it took at least a couple of minutes to sink and the Yankees, though dumb, were brave and might yet turn one of the big guns on her. A palpable ear swept through them. Doubt had crept into their minds many times. But now, now it was real and so was the terror. In the tiny cramped hold, the men shivered in their jackets and their blood was ice.

Dixon opened the hatch, braving perhaps a desperate shot, and shone the blue calcium light towards shore. A moment passed and he came down again. He checked the compass, cried, “Dive!” and opened his tanks. He pushed down on the planes and they slid beneath the black water.

Each man pushed himself hard as if his soul and not merely his life depended on speed.

It was then that the crankshaft froze, each man suddenly pushed back against the cold metal by his own strength. Something was tangled in the gears probably, but there was no way to reach them.

Dixon said, “Up! We should be far enough to be safe, and if necessary, we will surrender. But we will sink her lest the Yankees get their hands on her.”

“Surrender?” said Collins. “But—“

“No,” said Dixon. “We have no guns and no means of resistance. We have done what we intended to do. Beauregard will build more even if we can’t man them.”

They had sunk an enemy ship but their victory would be hollow if they were prisoners.

He began to fill his ballast tank. And Wicks, who had taken Alexander’s place at the rear, pumped his bellows. The forward section began to rise but the aft remained beneath. Wicks muttered, “Damn seaweed.” He tried to open the valve but it too was stuck. He turned at it, twisting his fingers until they were bloody and the iron was slick with it. “Damn. It’s stuck.”

Simkins said, “Let me try.” The blood made it slick and hard to twist and it was jammed tight. Someone produced a soiled handkerchief to wipe away the blood but even when they did the valve remained sealed.

Panic began to set in, the memory of the thirteen dead foremost on each mind.

Dixon, calm as ever, a man the South could only be proud of, said, “We’ll open the hatches. She’ll flood but we aren’t that deep. We can swim to the surface, and either cry for rescue or swim for shore, depending on how far we are.”

The panic subsided. If Dixon knew that there was still hope, then they could still escape alive.

The hatches were stuck. Both of them.

Overwhelming panic caused Collins to scramble over the men towards the forward hatch. He reached the hatch and slammed against it with all his strength, then again so they heard bones shatter.

Dixon pulled him down, wrapped his arms around the man. “Help me, damn it!”

Becker grabbed for Dixon saying, “We have to get out. Let him try. I’ll try when he’s done.”

The men took turns yet the iron held fast. The boat bobbed along, the aft end scraping the ocean floor. The sound of metal against sand and rock echoed through the chamber like the sound of heavy chains carried by the damned.

Exhaustion and hypoxia set in. It took longer to recover and turns came before they were rested. Soon everyone sat at one seat or another, tired and dizzy, black spots dancing across their eyes.

Dixon took his lucky bent gold coin and threw it hard against the iron.

Despair is a mortal sin.

Hallucinations set in: men spoke of seeing their dead relatives, grandparents or parents or in some cases a sibling or cousin; they spoke of wild shapes and fearsome beasts and denizens of Hell. Someone pointed towards something white, saying it was like a face made of loose gauze.

It was more like a mourning shroud, worn and aged by time and still wearing clods of earth rubbed into the cloth.

It was like a face too, a childlike and impossibly cruel face; and the face was laughing.

Caleb heard the water crashing against the iron, eager to save him. But the boat’s interior was as dry as bones or a summertime’s gravesite. Though it was poison, Caleb struggled desperately for one more lungful of air before he fell.

His eyes were open and they saw that there was an afterlife; and that afterlife was the harshest of deserts, an arid and terribly unforgiving desert populated by a single cruel and familiar face. He finally knew Hell.

The story of the Hunley is true. It was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel and all hands were lost. It was recovered in 1995, nearly 150 years after sinking. Currently, tours are shown on the weekend at the Charleston naval base where she is being studied. I went on one such tour and held my one-year-old son (admittedly big for his age) against a false color full-size image of the Hunley. He would have had no more than a foot of headroom standing straight. The full story of the astonishingly brave men of the Hunley can be found in Mark K. Ragan’s excellent book, The Hunley: Submarines, Sacrifice & Success in the Civil War.

The story of Caleb Simkins is fictional. The historical record notes that a C. Simkins from the C.S.S. Indian Chief was one of the final crew of the Hunley. History tells us only that he existed. Though there are records of the other men which, in some cases like Dixon’s are quite detailed, Simkin’s life, like the disappearance of the Hunley, is a complete mystery.

The Seamstress

Lindsay Vella

Above all else, I am a spy. The ghost of the seamstress who sewed our grandmother’s wedding dress tells us this each night before we fall asleep. She is gray-haired and weepy, and we believe her. She calls us trinkets as we cover her with our hands, she is so small. She says it’s the lake that is keeping her here. She tells us not to eat the berries we pick near the water, so we don’t. In the lake, there is a city so marvelous we can’t even imagine it. She tells us about this city each night before we fall asleep. It is filled with the ghosts of mermaids and those who died at sea. She tells us her husband is there. All this time, she is sewing our wedding dresses. She is afraid of bridges, so we become afraid of bridges. She doesn’t like fish. She wrings her hands when she’s not sewing. She continues to tell us about the city each night before we fall asleep. We dream about what she is doing while we are sleeping. We dream of sailors and fish bones. We wring our hands in our sleep. When we wake up, we know that she has gone back to the lake. On each of our beds is a pretty white dress.

Three Hats

Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

On the street, his moniker was various: Three Hats, Three-Hat Juan, El Diablo, the Red Man. His favorite drink was chili paste mixed into lukewarm tap water. He wore a black vest with a total of four pockets, one on the inside large enough to hold half a sandwich, one along the left breastbone in which he had long kept one button and one tooth, and two above his hips, on either side, both of which were torn. Three Hats always misrecollected the deteriorated condition of these pockets, and sometimes put coins there only to discover that his fingers could not withdraw them again. For him, pockets were as much for losing things as for keeping them. The button and the tooth in his breast pocket were different. He kept it in the back of his mind that, as part of some general restoration, the button might someday be put back on the vest and the tooth back in his head.

And the vest itself should never be lost, for it was crucial to the Red Man’s customary attire. He had his red, polyester, long sleeve shirt with the pointy collar tips, and his deep burgundy trousers verging on threadbare. He seldom wore shoes, and his red feet poked out of his trouser legs, hard and calloused from years of pavement passing beneath them. Once a girl had sat with him under the fruit market awning and, for a reason he couldn’t reckon at all, had painted his toenails black. “There you go, Diablo,” she had said. “That’s all you needed to complete the look.” He had to agree it was a nice effect.

The Red Man could sleep in the same position for twenty-four hours at a stretch, which worried passersby on the street sometimes, who would see him curled in a doorway when they left their apartments for an evening and returning seven hours later—after eating, drinking, dancing—to find him in exactly the same position. If they nudged him and gently spoke one of his names, they might be relieved to feel a long exhalation of breath, but he would not wake. And for the Red Man, this was nothing, for as a youth in his native country, he would routinely sleep for days at a time, even weeks, as his family sang and ate and labored and laughed and wept and sometimes slept around him. He often woke to find the circumstances of his life very changed. New people would have arrived in the great house, orphans, long-lost cousins, new wives for his brothers, and familiar people would have left: Grandfather Tobias had died at the dinner table during one of his long sleeps, and his favorite sister, Rosa, had disappeared one unusually foggy night. He had woken to the debate amongst his family about where she had gone, the convent, marriage, or the otherworld. “Your sister has left us without a word,” they told him, and groggy as he was, he found that what he most wanted was to return to bed. She was the eldest daughter in the family, but of all his brothers and sisters, she was the closest to him in temperament. Both of them had lived in dreams, and the world of the great house, the family, the town three miles away were more oneiric than real to them, insubstantial, always on the verge of fading into nothingness. And Juan knew that Rosa had not merely vanished, but had left this dream for another, where he would eventually find her.

He had dreamed of her, of calling for her through the fog. “Rosa! Rosa!” In his dreamworld, his voice sounded weak and thin, unable to penetrate the layers of heavy, damp air that wove around him. He tried calling louder, and louder. He summoned her from whatever mystery had consumed her, calling insistently through weeks of dreaming, certain she could not but respond to his summons. When he awoke next, the house was in a panic of activity. “Come, Juan,” his grandmother Cynthia had said, “enough sleep, now. We must all leave this house at once. It’s cursed.” Juan did not feel like going anywhere, except, vaguely, back to bed. He yawned and stretched, the bottom of his striped pajama shirt lifting to reveal a taut belly, which he lazily scratched. Brothers, wives, and their children fled past him in the hallways, their arms full of bags, and dolls, and pictures snatched from the walls.

“What d’ya mean? What’s happening? Where’s everyone going?” He stopped a small child it seemed he had never seen before.

“The house is cursed,” the child said, his fluty voice gone all grave. “La Rosa. La Rosa!”

Rosa? Was she back? He wanted to see her. “Mother,” he grasped a woman running by him, who was indeed his mother. “Is Rosa here?”

“I don’t know, Juan. I don’t know what’s happening except that El Diablo has put his hand on this house, and we must leave it now, while we can.” They had reached the main hall, where suitcases were being stacked and carried four and five at a time out the door which stood wide open. Juan thought he smelled rose perfume. “Come just as you are, Juan. We’ll get you some clothes in town. We cannot wait for you!”

“But, Mother. I don’t want to go. What if Rosa returns and finds no one here? Someone must wait for her.”

His mother took a step backwards, as if to regard his whole length through her slitted eye. Her lips were tight and dark. “Juan. Did you call Rosa from your dreams? Have you been calling her?”

“I think so, Mother.” Juan knew he had.

Her hand flew to her chest, gripping something that lay there under her dress. “El Diablo! You are not my son.” She fled through the open door of the house, never to enter it again. Others followed her, saying goodbye on their way, but without looking at him, and soon Juan stood in the quiet main hall, alone in the house for the first time in his life. He felt sleepy, and he lay down on the carpet to sleep. In his sleep he dreamed of Rosa.

He slept and slept in the quiet house, his longest sleep yet—it may have been years—and when he awoke the house was dark and fragrant. From very far away, he heard birds singing—night birds? The door still stood open, but he could not see out. There was something covering the entrance, a dark net or web. He reached for it with his hands, and something fell into his palm from the dark wall. Rose petals. He reached out again, this time struck by sharp pain. A thorn had pierced him, and blood ran down his wrist. There was a wall of roses covering the door.

Slowly, making his way through the close-shuttered house, Juan inspected the windows and doors—all covered in blood-dark roses and thorny vines. He discovered the same situation on the second floor of the house, and even the attic windows were knotted over with roses. Juan did not know if it was night or day. He did not really know if he slept and dreamed or dreamed and woke. He did not know if he was still Juan, without his family here to name him, or something else, El Diablo. In his father’s room he found a hat, his grandfather’s fedora, and put it on his head. “Tobias,” he said. “Grandfather Tobias.” Could he summon a spirit for company?

But Juan was alone. He went to the kitchen and found only rotten food. He tried to sleep in the pantry, where he used to curl up in the sunny afternoons of his childhood, but, strangely, he could not sleep. Grandfather’s hat on his head, Juan took a few large knives from the kitchen and returned to the door. He began cutting, and rose petals dropped and vines split under his energy. His hands and arms were cut, scratched, and blood ran, soaking his pajamas and making his knives sticky and hard to wield. But still he cut, and forced his body into the wedge he’d made, and cut further. He forced his body further, cut until his whole body ran with blood, and he could not see through the vines to what lay outside. His breath slicing through his lungs, Juan did not know whether to continue or to fall back, exhausted and bloody, into the house. He hacked a bit ahead, crying now because he realized that to stay still meant risking being embalmed by the vines, which grew quickly, entangling his legs and pressing against his narrow chest. If he paused too long, he would die in La Rosa’s embrace.

Desperate, he fell back into the house, clutching his knives and throbbing with pain and blood. He lay on the floor, a voice in his throat that he did not recognize as his calling out grunts and moans. He could think of no name, not Rosa, not Mother, not Grandfather, that could help him. He lay and lay, awake and throbbing, and finally said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, help me!” He burned in a blood-fever, gripping his knives. After a few hours, he got to his feet and limped back to his father’s bedroom, where he removed his bloodied pajamas and girded himself in his father’s clothes. He put on the clean, white underthings, soft against his bloody wounds, and then a shirt, a vest, a suit, an overcoat, yellow kid gloves, and—for good measure—his father’s top hat right over his grandfather’s hat. “My God, oh, Padre, help me!” And Juan returned to the door and slashed more furiously through the vines, tearing them away in a rage and forcing his body into the crevice he made. But the vines, too, seemed more furious, and they wound about him, stopping his hand, wrenching away a knife, plucking away his coat, his jacket and vest, the clothes shredding and falling away, vanishing amongst the dark roses, and though now Juan wanted to die, he would not give his body to be chewed on by thorns, and so fell back into the house, naked and shaking with anger. Again, he lay there, unsleeping, one hand holding a knife, the other resting on the top of his head, still covered by two hats.

Just a young man, Juan had never fallen in love, but his brothers had. Their love had hummed through the walls as Juan slept his death-like sleeps. Juan had never thought of kissing. He had never driven a car, but there had always been three of four cars in the drive. He had never danced in the night or laughed with friends out under the stars, but he could remember what Rosa had looked like home late from a night of dancing, her laughter, her cheek outshining the white cheek of the moon. He had not been to the city since he was a child, but remembered the noise and calls of humanity enwrapping his dreams. He had not labored. The smallest nostalgia for the embrace of these things awoke in his thin chest, and—naked, alone, sleepless—Juan felt incomplete. He was too vulnerable, just a child, but grown now into a man’s body. His father’s clothes had not protected him. He was hungry. He limped back into the kitchen. He needed nourishment. He needed protection.

In the cupboard, he found a jar of grandmother Cynthia’s chili paste. He could remember the expansive smack of it. He opened the jar and sniffed the red paste. Every one of his wounds cried out in hunger. His mouths watered with blood. Dipping his fingers into the paste, the scratches on his hands burned, were seared, became adamant scars. Gently and with great care, Juan fed all of his mouths, covering his naked body with the chili paste. His wounds were cauterized, and the white skin of his youth became a deep red. From the soles of his feet to his pointed, black beard, Juan armed himself. He treated his face last, and with the tenderness of a lover, he rubbed the paste over his eyes, along his aquiline nose, up into the roots of his thick, black hair. He no longer felt pain. He was a flame. He left his knives on the table and returned to the door.

But there was no point attempting the door again, while he was still incomplete. There was one thing lacking. Juan climbed the stairs, the sinews of his thighs coiling under red skin. He entered Rosa’s bedroom. In her closet he found a hat she used to wear, a little red cone with a set of fake cherries dangling from its floppy tip. Reverently, he put this hat on his head, feeling it snug against his scalp. And carefully, carefully, he covered Rosa’s hat with his grandfather’s fedora, and both of them with his father’s top hat. Now he was ready. He stood, naked and gleaming red under his three hats, before the door and the wall of roses and thorny vines. “La Rosa,” he said.

“La Rosa,” he said. “La Rosa. I am your own brother, imprisoned. I dreamt you here and slept in your perfumed embrace. And I think you dreamt me here as well.” Juan paused and looked at his red hands. Even his nails, grown long in long sleeps, were red and hard under the chili paste. “Now we must part ways. Let me out. Or in. Let me in.” And he walked toward the wall of roses, with no intention of stopping, come what may. He reached out his thin, delicate hand and stroked the thorny wall, and a few rose petals fell into his palm. He crushed them against his face, exulting in their perfume. The wall began to part; a cleft appeared. Juan entered it, feeling his way through. The thorns reached out to him, but not with fury as they had before. They pricked his skin like little tongues, and the roses brushed against him softly. His body was full of excitement; he felt he would never sleep again. He made his way through the close darkness, imbued with the power of being deep inside, as deep as can be. He knew everything about himself, complete, and his body shook with love.

And then he felt a releasing of the tension around him and—air on his face—she was letting him go. They parted ways under the moon, and Juan walked toward the city, where on the streets he would find sleep again and enflamed dreams, where he would be hailed Three Hats, Three-Hat Juan, El Diablo, the Red Man. He was to remain stained red for the rest of his life. People would give him everything he needed. There was no cause for worry. Old women carried buckets of roses into the restaurants and bars for men to buy for their sweethearts, and sometimes they would kindly lean over the Red Man, offering a flower. “La Rosa?”

“La Rosa.” And he’d hold it to his red cheek, blooming again with joy.

Poor summer, she doesn’t know she’s dying.

Lindsay Vella

We are almost purple. After that, we will be almost yellow. Last time we were here, there was a dry creek; now there is a river. Despite all our best efforts, the door to this place still creaks. It drips oil onto the floor and we’re too afraid to light the candles in the bathroom. You tell me they were only ever for decoration, but I feel as though I have fewer choices now.

Get him, eat him, the door creaks.

One time you painted me scarlet. I didn’t know that it was an ancient color and I would have to wear it always. While you were in the other room, I cut my hair and put it inside the grandfather clock. When you came back, I cut my fingernails and left them inside the oven. This is what you’ve always called sentimental. This is what I’ve always called a frenzy.

I am still hungry, the door creaks.

Soon, the whole valley will flood and this little locked house will be washed away with the rainwater. Soon, the ground will start sinking and the lawn furniture will be lost forever. You will eventually decide to leave everything so we can save ourselves. The door will stop creaking and I still won’t want to leave. You will lift the bed skirt and find me there, a monster.

Three guys try to carry a couch across the country.

Three guys on an important

mission involving furniture.

It’s just a couch, right?

COUCH

a novel by

Benjamin Parzybok

“An argument for shifting your life around . . . for getting off the couch and making something happen.”—The L Magazine

JOAN AIKEN

THE SERIAL GARDEN

The Complete Armitage Family Stories

“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”

—Philip Pullman

Death’s Shed

J. M. McDermott

1

When I was a boy, and my mother had just died, I had vivid dreams of the land of the dead.

2

My father began the train set after my mother died, in our apartment in Toronto. It filled the time he spent when he wasn’t working.

I felt like I was a ghost of my mother, among his trains, with pieces of her face looking up at him.

My father filled the green hills of his train set with Restoration-era cottages, and cities with both Gothic cathedrals and industrial bridges. The passengers of the brass and wood trains were tiny robotic gentlemen in top hats and monocles, sipping oil. Carriages with steam-powered horses carried people to train stations and picked up people from train stations. Larger robots wandered the hills, fixing and repairing and re-filling everything. Everything moved and nothing sat still and the tiny robots and men went from train to carriage to train and nobody ever arrived at a destination.

When the train set was too big for the apartment, we moved to a house in the mountains above Vancouver.

3

My neighbor’s horrible girls hid from me, and I sought them.

The girls were twins. One of them was bigger with brown hair. The other had gangly legs and bony arms and red hair. They had the same ugly face. They were both bigger than I was.

I walked around the bushes in my backyard, to reach the shed at the edge, where the mountain woods leaned over the fence like a frozen green avalanche.

There wasn’t supposed to be anything in the shed. My father and I had come from our small apartment in Toronto before my mother died. We couldn’t fill up our new, large property yet. The shed smelled like lead paint and concrete dust. It smelled like rot.

I found a man there. He looked at me like he didn’t care if I said anything or not about him being there.

I had never met anyone like that before. I had seen the dirty drifters everywhere around here. They staggered through the alleys and crawled through the parks and sprawled in the streets unashamed of their dirtiness. Cops knew them all by name, and talked with them.

And now, I saw one in my dusty shed, and I could talk to him like I was a cop.

I asked him what he thought he was doing there. He offered me a cigarette. I took it from him. He lit one up for himself. I pocketed the one he gave me.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, but here I am,” he said. He had an old voice. He blew smoke at me.

“Have you seen two girls trying to hide?”

He shook his head.

“If my dad finds you, he’ll call the cops.”

“Would you rather call the cops or play hide and seek with those girls?”

I heard giggling somewhere in the trees. Giggling was a bad sign. I looked over my shoulder.

“I might be better off hiding here with you.”

“Go find the girls,” he said. “You can take ’em.”

“They’re bigger than me.”

“Bruises mean they like you,” he said. “People hurt the ones they love.”

The giggling got closer.

I bolted for the house.

They were faster.

They tackled me. They pinned me down. The bigger one held me to the ground. The gangly one pulled my pants down.

They had found a dead animal—I couldn’t tell what it used to be but it was probably a cat or a dog or a huge rat—and they had picked it up with a stick. They had decided to shove it down my pants.

The gangly one hit me with the stick she had used to carry the dead animal, as hard as she could. It hurt. Red welts rose from my skin.

I didn’t cry out. What good would it have done? The man in the shed wouldn’t help me. My father was in his basement with his trains. I bit down hard. I didn’t even struggle. They wanted me to struggle, and I wouldn’t give them that.

After the gangly one had gotten bored whipping me, she used the stick to pick up the dead animal. She placed it on my buttocks. She gingerly tried to work my pants back up, and over the corpse. This lasted until her skin made contact with a patch of rancid fur. She squealed. She shook her hand like it was on fire. She ran off. The bigger one ran after her sister, giggling like a princess.

I looked behind me at what the girls had done.

I listened to the sound of the ravens in the air. This mountain was full of ravens. The girls must have chased a few off to get their prize.

4

When I was just a boy, and my mother had just died, I had vivid dreams of the land of the dead.

When I closed my eyes, my spirit roamed the hills of Elysium, searching for her. I called out her name among the ethereal trees and grasslands. The ground there was built of the dead single-cell life that crowded up everything like mud with their protoplasmic soul-energy. The dead grasses and trees attached themselves to the spirit mud with wilted branches, no flowers, no fruits, and no wind to make them dance. The people and animals lounged about, waiting until all their memories of life had faded.

The lion curled up with the lamb not because they were at peace, but because they could not remember that they were at war. The poets and mystics there tried to speak with empty voices, but they made no sound. Some took to sign language, and I watched them briefly while soaring past them. They gestured with their hands in a language no living mortal could translate. Even the greatest of philosophers could only speak in signs that none could validate without a world to serve as the foundation of the symbols—no better than trying to speak with mouths.

A few signed to me when they heard my voice breaching their darkness. I did not recognize them. They did not recognize me. My voice was the only sound in this shadow realm, and it had no echo. I suspect they wanted me to stop and give their hand signals the meaning of the living, but I did not. I was not there to help dead philosophers. I was looking for my mother.

The realm of the dead is far larger than anyone can fathom. I saw alien beasts and sea creatures swimming in the sky. I saw giants. I saw cavemen with their ape faces and straight backs. Herds of woolly mammoths and feathered dinosaurs ambled carelessly among the humans.

They all looked numb.

My visions stopped when I got older. My father and I bought the new house in the mountains above Vancouver. He worked in his office on the top floor. He built new bodily organs to run on blood steam, and he played with trains in the basement when he wasn’t working. In between, he made meals for me and shuttled me to and from school in the city. He told me to play with my new friends next door. His mind was always lingering in his basement, and his sprawling retro-Victorian train models.

5

I needed to tell my dad, because I needed to tell somebody, about what the girls did this time. But I didn’t think he’d do anything.

I pulled my pants down, and shook off the dead animal into the bushes. I went inside. I took a shower. I changed my clothes. My dad was in the basement, with his trains. Should I have even bothered him, when I knew he would do nothing?

I had a black eye, once, and he asked me what I had done to the girls. He had told me not to hit back. I had cuts and scrapes and he scolded me for blaming the girls.

My father wore a dapper period costume complete with ruffled shirt, tweed trousers, and a monocle he held in his eye by squinting. He kept a flask of gin in an ankle holster and a small laser under his shoulder.

The laser was custom made to look like something from the early twentieth century. He used the laser for high-detail wood-burning and soldering and it wasn’t strong enough to hurt anybody bad.

My father was building steam-powered zeppelins as big as shoes that would fly around the air above the trains along invisible fishing lines like skytrains with gossamer tracks.

I considered tapping his shoulder. Part of me thought that if I stopped my father’s work, his little world would stop, too. The trains would stop; the robots would stop; the steam engines all over the basement tables would stop.

I noticed something new. Little women in hoop skirts carried tiny parasols and wore fine silks as if small spiders had woven gorgeous doll clothes just for them. The robot men that dressed like my father—robotic with silver skin and painted eyes—strutted stately from one train to the next. They now had women on their arms.

The last time I had noticed something new it was the larger robots. Larger robots—as tall as cottages—with broad shoulders, square jaws, and claw arms made of rubber tubing, turned cranks in the cities. Stoplights changed. One robotic-horse-drawn carriage halted to allow another to pass.

I tried to get my father’s attention by waving my hands in his face. I touched his shoulder. He was too engaged in his zeppelins.

“Father,” I shouted.

His hand slipped. He bent the aluminum shell of his flying machine into a rounded heart. A tiny hiss of air escaped from the broken zeppelin. He turned to me, and pulled his monocle down. He took a deep breath. “Yes?” he said.

“I don’t want to play with those girls anymore,” I said. “They pulled my pants down and whipped me with a stick. They put a dead animal down my pants. They left marks,” I said. I tugged at my pants. “I have welts all over. I can show you the marks.”

My father grabbed at my hands. “If they whipped you like you say, you must have done something to anger them. Things happen for a reason. No one exerts themselves so hard without a prior cause. If they didn’t break your skin, you’ll be fine. It’s nothing but a prank. They’re the only children around here. We moved here so you could be closer to children.” He glanced at a clock on the wall. He frowned. “It is almost dinner-time, isn’t it?”

I wondered what it would be like to kill the girls, and send them to the land of the dead.

I had never told my father about my night visions, after my mother had died.

6

I told about the land of the dead to the man that lived in the empty shed in our backyard. He listened to me patiently.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“You guess?” said the man. “You’re either a Christian or you’re not. Do you believe in Christ?”

“My Mom did. We had her funeral in a cathedral. My dad’s a scientist. He wants to live forever.”

“Are you a scientist?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

He pulled out a cigarette. “I was a pagan, for a long time,” he said. He put the cigarette in his mouth. He lit a match. He pulled in the smoke.

“Pagans are a wild bunch. Christians are just as bad. Buddhists are better.”

“You think I should be a Buddhist?”

He shrugged. He held his cigarette up to me. I took it from him. I looked at the glowing tip of it, as if it were a living thing in my hand.

“Go on,” he said, “try it.”

Gingerly, I tried to breathe in the smoke. It hurt. I coughed.

The man laughed. “You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “Just taste the smoke in your mouth. Don’t inhale it, yet. You ain’t ready for that. Pull the smoke into your mouth. Then, push it out. It’s like squirting water.”

I tried again. It tasted awful. I liked it. I asked the man if he could remember his name.

He snorted at me. “If I could remember, I’d have told you. Be sure to brush your teeth and change your shirt before your dad smells you stinking of cigarettes.”

“He won’t notice,” I said.

The man smiled. “Maybe he won’t say anything, but he’ll notice.”

I didn’t like it when the man smiled. He didn’t have all of his teeth. The ones he did have were bent at strange angles, and smeared in sickly colors. One of them was pink. One of them was black. One of them was mottled and covered in green moss like a stone.

The man closed his eyes and leaned back against the shed wall. “Those girls still giving you trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Usually means they like you.”

“They don’t.”

“Whatever, kid,” he said. Then, when I was almost done with my cigarette, he spoke again. “You’ve thought a lot about the land of the dead?”

“Yeah. I never found my mother, though.”

He smoked down his cigarette. I waited.

He looked up at me. He chuckled. “The way the dead forget, they fall into a mind decay with nothing to replace their lost senses. The way the living forget, the senses are so full of stimuli that lost things crowd away the dead. You’re a boy in a new school, in a new house. You close your eyes and dream of all the trees in the yard, and all the things those girls do to you, and school, and your dad, and all that stuff. Every survivor will eventually lose touch with their forgetful beloved dead.”

I grimaced.

“It means that you never found your mother because you forgot her. It also means that she never found you because she forgot you,” he said. He lit another cigarette. “You were looking for each other.”

He closed his eyes. He was asleep as soon as his eyelids touched. He didn’t snore. He didn’t seem to breathe.

7

When my mother died, my father tore his own heart out. He replaced it with a steam engine powered by boiled blood. He had designed it himself, but his design was too late for my mother.

Sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he belched out steam like purple cigarette smoke.

In his office upstairs, he designed new organs out of steam engines and old alchemy manuals. He used to be a history professor of ancient medicines. When my mother got sick, he abandoned his books for biology. He invented organs for her that didn’t work. He invented machines that sometimes made things worse.

I remember covering my ears when I knew he was going to be operating on her again. She never screamed, but I expected her to scream, and I had covered my ears.

Then she died.

Then I dreamt of the land of the dead. I wandered the numb country of the darkness, calling out her name.

8

I told the man in the shed about my father’s heart. He listened. He didn’t say anything at all about my father. He asked after my mother instead.

“Did she like what he was doing to her?” he asked.

“Of course not, but she had been sick a long time, and nobody else could help her.”

The man nodded. “Do you remember what she looked like?”

“Not really. I have pictures of her, but they’re not the same.”

“Never are. Pictures are like flash cards. They aren’t real. They just remind you of the person.”

“I think I get it,” I said. Then, I said, “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said. “Do you think you’d know your mother if you saw her again?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” He pulled out a joint. It wasn’t marijuana, and it wasn’t tobacco. “You think you can handle this?”

I took it from him. It felt like it was alive.

“What is it?”

“It’s one of my teeth,” he said. He opened his mouth and pointed at a new gap in his gums. The mossy green one was gone.

“I’m not smoking that,” I said. I handed the joint with the tooth back to him.

He gestured for me to come closer. When I did, he slipped the wrapped tooth into my lapel pocket. “Those girls still giving you trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“Dad won’t do shit, huh?”

“No, he won’t do shit.”

“I’ll help you if you want.”

“How can you help?”

He smiled, and I stared into his mouth. I stared at the gap of the tooth he had handed me. I felt so alone, right then. I felt like I was the only boy in the world, and nothing in my life made sense and nobody cared about me—not even me. I felt like I wanted to die.

I shrugged. “If they catch you here, they’ll tell on you and police will come and run you off.”

He stopped smiling. “I’ll be fine,” he said. He stood up. He shook motion back into his bony legs. He stretched his arms over his head. “Bring one of them here.”

“Which one do you want?”

“The uglier one.”

“They’re both ugly.”

“One of them has to be uglier. If you can’t pick, just bring either one here. Only one.”

“Are you going to hurt her?”

“I will.”

“Good,” I said. “Don’t kill her, though.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t, okay?”

He handed me a box of cigarettes and matches. I pulled out a cigarette, inspected it for teeth, and then lit up. I pulled the smoke into my mouth. I tasted it. I let it go. I liked it.

9

I went to the neighbor’s house, where they lived. The neighborhood was huge, but most of the houses were empty now. Whole blocks were full of wild house cats and coyotes and ravens. I wasn’t allowed to go those ways.

The houses in our cul-de-sac had people in them. A few couples lived across the street. They had terrifying, gigantic dogs, and walked them every morning. They all waved and said hello in French if they saw me. Electric cars quietly zipped in and out of the garages. People might have been waving through the tinted glass.

10

When I knocked on the door, I expected one of the twins to answer. Their mother answered. I blinked and tried to smile like a kid should.

“Why, hello!” she said. She had a fake way of talking to kids. She smiled too big. She always had these big hand gestures, when she talked to kids. “You must be here to play with the girls!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I’ll go get them,” she said. She gave me a big thumbs up. Then, she waggled her finger at me. “Wait right here, big fella.” She disappeared into the house. I had never been inside.

I sniffed at my clothes for cigarette stink while I waited.

One of the twins came to the door. She had chocolate cake crumbs in her teeth when she sneered at me. She was the larger one, with the heavier fists. “I thought I heard the doorbell,” she said. She punched me on the arm. “I bet you have a crush on my sister. You want to kiss her, don’t you?”

“Shut up and listen,” I said. “Death lives in my shed and he wants to meet one of you girls. He wants to show us something cool.”

“Who?”

“Death,” I said. “He lives in my shed. He wants to meet one of you. Come on.”

“I’m not going into your stupid shed.”

I pulled out a cigarette carton from my pocket. I stuck it in my mouth like a rebel. I lit a match and pulled a drag off the cigarette. I blew the smoke towards her face.

Her eyes widened like headlights. I had her attention now. “How do you know he’s really Death?” she asked.

“It’s the kind of thing you just know,” I said. I blew smoke towards her face again, right in her eyes. She coughed at that. I heard the cheerful sound of heeled shoes on marble tiles. I threw the cigarette into the grass. “Death followed me back from when I was crossing over after my mother had died. We got to get moving,” I said. “He only wants to see one of you.” I grabbed her hand. I pulled her.

She let me.

We ran to the shed.

I didn’t watch. I opened the door for her. She looked inside, at the smoky, dusty darkness.

“Go on,” I said.

She saw him. “Are you… Death?”

He didn’t say anything. He must have gestured to her. I wasn’t watching him.

She walked inside like it was just any old dusty shed, and he was just any old man there, in the shed. I closed the door behind her. I waited outside. I listened to her muffled scream. I heard the sound of a body crumpling. Death came out of the shed. He had the girl’s body in his arms. “Take her to your dad,” he said. “She won’t be dead when he’s done with her.

I did. I dragged her to the basement. She was horribly heavy and limp and it took a long time to get her down there. I could barely hold her up. I shouted for my father to help me with her.

He checked her pulse with one hand. There was no pulse. He threw her onto the train tracks. The robots of the hills walked over her cool, pale flesh. The trains stopped and robots and people came out to watch. Some of the smaller robots crawled down her throat. An aluminum zeppelin emptied the passengers onto her white forehead. A robot cut the fishing line that held the airship on its path. Tiny robots worked in teams to bend the aluminum zeppelin into the shape of a heart.

“She’s going to be fine,” said my father. “Don’t worry.”

The aluminum heart went down her throat.

My father had his laser out, and he used it to burn through her clothes, into her chest, through her skin, and into the bones. He pulled out the other heart with one hand—it was black from Death and from the burning of the laser. I peered inside her open, bleeding chest. Her cracked ribs looked like a spider uncurling from a bloody egg.

The robots pulled everything back together. Women from the trains sewed her skin shut, then her clothes.

11

The other twin beat me up for a while. She wanted to know how come her sister was like that, now. I just waited out her anger like the man in the shed had told me to do, and then she’d be lonely.

Her sister spent more time with my father now, building small, glowing planetoids. She hung them with white Christmas lights around the basement.

I never went back to the shed. I never told anyone else what I had called there, when I was just a boy and screaming for my mother and her screaming for me, and neither one of us finding the other.

12

When the skinnier, ganglier twin was done beating me up, she became my friend. She was sad all the time, like me. We split what was left of my cigarettes above the houses, hiding in the mountain trees. We plotted ways to acquire more cigarettes. She sneaked beer and whiskey from her mother’s locked cabinets. We broke into the vacant houses and rummaged through cabinets for old bottles of booze.

I asked her if she had ever smoked a joint.

“Marijuana?” she said. She perked up. “Do you have some?”

I pulled out Death’s tooth still in the rolling paper. I didn’t tell her what it really was. We smoked it up above the treeline, near the top of the mountain.

She and I wandered the hills of the country of the dead, holding hands.

I called out for my mother, for my father. She called out for her sister. Neither one of us found what we were looking for. The land of dead never even echoed.

When we came back to the living, we tore each other’s clothes off. I wasn’t twelve yet, and she wasn’t a year older than me. We tried our best in the mossy mountain woods, though. We didn’t know what we were doing.

We tried our best a long time.

Dear Aunt Gwenda: Dangers of Hibernation Edition

Gwenda Bond

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

At my apartment, the outdoor entryway has protruding nails that like to eat the cuffs of my pants. Maintenance does nothing. Advice?

JM

AG: We have so many things to talk about here. It’s possible you don’t even live in an apartment—not really. The portruding-nail pant-cuff issue is one of the first indicators that someone is living on a space station reality simulation, and not just that, but one that has been hastily constructed under thin regulatory standards. The answers to the following questions should help:

1) Are said “pants” actually part of a regulation unisuit issued to you upon move-in?

2) When you leave the “apartment” do you go to a square- or dome-shaped building where you conduct a monotonous task involving heavy machinery cogs and steam, and where a proctor raps your knuckles if you speak to any of your unisuited colleagues?

3) When you look out your window, do you see the environs of deep space?

If the answer to any of these is yes (and we both know it is), then maintenance will return your calls only when the first case of space madness is documented. I suggest you either embrace your inner raving lunatic or perhaps bribe a unisuited colleague without making the consequences entirely clear.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

If I seek an interstitial boyfriend, does that mean I have to slipstreamproof the bed?

Steve

AG: Of course not. Everyone knows that interstitial boyfriends prefer infernokrusher revival beds, preferably shaped like monster trucks, with stairs you have to climb for entry.

Dear Aunt Gwenda:

Is this the right time to buy a shotgun, move out to the middle of nowhere, and live off the land?

Signed,

Dave

AG: You know what I like to call that? Quitter talk. While you’re at it, why don’t you just start a cult too? (And every reader of Karen Joy Fowler short stories knows the difference between a religion and a cult: “.... a cult is just a set of rules that lets certain men get laid.” On second thought, let’s set the cult idea aside.)

The sad fact is, the middle of nowhere has gotten pretty crowded and I don’t think you’d like every Cormac McCarthy fan you met out there. There are strange things afoot in them thar hills, things that may not be fightable with shotguns, inhabiting land that may not be livable. I have heard tales of humans beginning to hibernate in such places, leaving non hibernating creatures to assume a place in civilization previously closed to their kind. You fall into a deep sleep, shotgun in hand, and your Hermit Shack (TM) is immediately beset by packs of deer who lick your TV screen and poke holes in your favorite socks. They read your novels, then eat the pages they like best, and agree they taste better than bark. You wake to the kind of scene that kicks your paranoia into overdrive. There are humans in the forest. It doesn’t end well.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

When I was 16 my mother and stepfather bought me a Lane hope chest—just what every girl wanted. Over the next few years I filled it with things for when I was married as young girls are supposed to do. Off to college, out on my own, I took it with me. For twenty-five years I have hauled this big piece of carved cedar of early American design with a rose colored cushion on top from one end of the country to the other. It’s been in my guest room for the past six years. My mother sees it every time she comes to visit. But here’s the thing:

I never liked it.

A couple of weeks ago I sold it at a garage sale for $50. (Pretty good price I thought.) It has never been my style (more Laura Ingalls than Emma Peel) (I aspire to Emma Peel) and I was sick of keeping this thing simply because my mother bought it. But next year she will be back and she’s going to notice that it’s gone. So what do I say to her? Do I tell her the truth? Or say it’s in the store room buried under boxes? Or there was a fire and it was the only thing burned? (A stretch, I know.)

Should I let her know I’ve never liked it? What do you think?

Signed,

All grown up and still terrified of my mother

AG: Unlike the guy who doesn’t realize he lives on a space station or the one in hibernation, you have several options. Perhaps this hope chest plays a critical part in an alternate reality, and only by sending it there could you prevent a terrible cataclysm from befalling us all. By giving you this hope chest, your mother saved the world, and isn’t that the most important thing?

True, I don’t think even Emma Peel’s mother would go for that one.

Maybe you could tell her of a poor orphan child, taken in during the dead of night. A child with abyss-black eyes and no possessions to her name. A child who needed only the right piece of furniture to travel back to an alternate reality...

Okay, yes, storage sounds good. Possibly hint at redecoration. Otherwise, take the secret of not really liking it to either a) your grave or b) a night when your mother gets really boozy and tells you she never liked it in the first place and can’t believe you kept it all those years.

It could happen.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Why does the woman outside my cage always stare at that bright screen and tap on that black-bar-thing in front of her? What’s so interesting about it?

Sincerely,

A Canary in a Cage

AG: You’re getting so close to space madness, and yet no visit from “maintenance.” Keep trying.

Dear Aunt Gwenda, Why does your cat have 6 toes?

Anonymous

AG: Why, indeed? An oversight on my part, really.

Had I but known hibernation would become part of the human life cycle…

Now I watch Hem and know that he will use his unnatural thumbs to open the door for the deer. He will already have licked the television and turned down the corners of pages in our books.

We will awaken in confusion wearing unisuits, and remember nothing. Is this a cult or a religion? Someone will ask, and it will seem like something we once knew the answer to, but have forgotten.

About These Authors

Jenny Terpsichore Abeles is an amateur cosmologist, ragpicker, fabulist, and wandering scholar. She lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts (she thinks) and is writing a novel about Renaissance feminism and werewolves. “Three Hats” is her first non-self published story and LCRW is her favorite literary magazine, so she’s having an unusually splendid day.

Gwenda Bond (gwendabond.typepad.com/bondgirl) has just finished a novel.

Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York and holds a degree in computer science from Brown University. In 1989 he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. His fiction has won three Hugos, four Nebulas, three Locus awards, and a Sturgeon award. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

Sarah Goldstein was born in Toronto and lives in western Massachusetts. Her artwork has been exhibited in the US and Canada, and her first book, Fables, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press next spring.

Carlea Holl-Jensen was born on a Wednesday. Since then, her short fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz and Call & Response, and she once received a prize. She is confident that you will enjoy reading her blog at hourofgold.wordpress.com.

Patty Houston lives in Cincinnati with her husband and daughters. She teaches English at the University of Cincinnati and is also at work on a short story collection.

Rahul Kanakia is an international development consultant based in Washington, D.C.

J. M. McDermott’s favorite color is dark blue. With five novels forthcoming, he has not been able to keep up with all the activity of his favorite television programs. Forthcoming books include a reprint of his critically-acclaimed Last Dragon, with his new novel Maze from Apex Books, and a fantasy trilogy beginning with Never Knew Another from Nightshade.

Sean Melican would like you to know that true love exists. Oh, and that Popeye’s is da shizz.

Philip Raines lives in Linlithgow in Scotland. Harvey Welles lives in the Milwaukee of his mind.

Veronica Schanoes’s work has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, and Sybil’s Garage. She lives in New York City where she is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College—CUNY. She does not like cats.

Darrell Schweitzer has also rewritten a good deal of the works of H.P. Lovecraft into limerick form. Among his longer works, he has published about 300 stories and three novels. His PS Publications novella Living with the Dead was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He used to edit Weird Tales and now edits anthologies, the most recent of which are Cthulhu’s Reign and Full Moon City (with Martin Greenberg).

Lindsay Vella has been assigned a flammability rating of 3 (severe fire hazard). Fires involving Lindsay Vella should be fought upwind and from the maximum distance possible. Keep unnecessary people away; isolate hazard and deny entry. Her poems have appeared in Spork, and she lives in Detroit. v

Previous issues of this zine have been handily recycled for you by Random House into a lovely book-shaped object:

Inside this book there are no ads for other issues of the zine. Although there is a slightly-out-of-date subscription list. Neither are there ads set at silly angles with boxes that cut right through the title of the zine. Neither are their silly self-referential—oh, wait, there are those.

“If this is the 21st century zine, the form can be taken off the endangered list.”—Rick Klaw, Austin Chronicle

“One of my favorite literary magazines.”—Jessa Crispin, Bookslut

“LCRW’s times as a low-profile fringe zine may be at an end.”—Publishers Weekly

“An immersion into a fantastic world.”—Adrienne Martini, Baltimore City Paper

“A must for fans of bleeding-edge speculative fiction.”—Romantic Times (4.5 stars)

The Best of LCRW (So Far, as we like to say) has many fabby stories, some excellent poems, a few bits of nonfiction, and an excellent introduction by Dan Chaon who writes about genres, campfires, and, if memory serves, mixes the two with an accelerant and provides a lovely roaring fire.

Now that’s how to start a book!

The Perfect Gift for Writers

Table of Contents

The Cruel Ship’s Captain

Harvey Welles and Philip Raines

Reasoning about the Body

Ted Chiang

Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders’ Flash Fever

Patty Houston

Sleep

Carlea Holl-Jensen

Three Poems by Lindsay Vella

The Way to the Sea

Spit Out the Seeds

Thirst

The Other Realms Were Built With Trash

Rahul Kanakia

Alice: a Fantasia

Veronica Schanoes

Dueling Trilogies

Darrell Schweitzer

Absence of Water

Sean Melican

The Seamstress

Lindsay Vella

Three Hats

Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

Poor summer, she doesn’t know she’s dying.

Lindsay Vella

Death’s Shed

J. M. McDermott

Dear Aunt Gwenda: Dangers of Hibernation Edition

Gwenda Bond

About These Authors